Geordie Boffin Podcast Podcasts

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The Geordie Boffin Science Podcast is an irregular and irreverent tour of science news from the Sciencebase.com website Primary Format : Science Language : Unknown Also Listed as: City : Cambridge State/Province : Cambs Country : United Kingdom Region : EU User Tags: User Votes: RSS Feed Website People found this Podcast Searching for: View this Podcast on a Google Map. Podcast iTunes Link Text Only listing of Geordie Boffin Podcast Podcasts Methings.com listings of Geordie Boffin Podcast Podcasts If you like this podcast, you might also like:

Research in the past and structural correctness These are the latest science news links and snippets from Sciencebase: Scientific Research in the Past – Literally a blast from the past: This item about science in museums and finding a job in museum research was posted on Sciencebase.com way back in 2005, but was originally an “Adapt or Die” feature article for the [...]Research in the past and structural correctness is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Periodic Table of Google Elements This Periodic Table has even less to do with chemistry than my PT of science bloggers. Regardless, it’s still worth a mention, just because it hints at chemistry however indirectly. More periodicity A Periodic Table of Google Elements Using the Periodic Table Blogging the Periodic Table: Rare earths Related Posts:Real chemistry at the periodic table [...]Periodic Table of Google Elements is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Chemweb, A-levels, vuvuzelas again These are the latest science news links and snippets from Sciencebase: Chemical news – Two years on, a simple color change test emerges from China for melamine in milk, The Alchemist learns. Also, with a Chinese connection, new insights into the mode of action of a former herbal remedy for fever could improve the outlook [...]Chemweb, A-levels, vuvuzelas again is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Oilspill, asthma, melamine, peer review These are the latest science news links and snippets from Sciencebase: That underwater hydrocarbon plume is still there – Things in the Gulf of Mexico may not be cleaning themselves up quite as fast as some had claimed and many had hoped. Surprise, surprise Paracetamol use and risk of asthma in teenagers studied – NHS [...]Oilspill, asthma, melamine, peer review is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What’s the point of the semantic web? I was scanning journal tables of contents as usual this week and it occurred to me that there must be a better way to find relevant and timely research information that would be of interest to Sciencebase readers…and, of course, out pops the following title: Technically approaching the semantic web bottleneck Sounded, perfect…kind of…but what’s [...]What’s the point of the semantic web? is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cleaning up emissions Emissions trading is an economic workaround, a fudge if you will, to reducing one’s pollution levels by buying off the emissions credits of others who are polluting less. Emissions trading (also known as cap and trade) is a market-based approach used to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of [...]Cleaning up emissions is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Drug testing, solar fullerenes, chemicalization These are my recent science picks, including my latest contributions to spectroscopyNOW.com Drug testing – A simple analytical approach to identifying drugs of abuse would be a boon to forensic scientists and law enforcement agencies. A collaboration between researchers in the US and Europe demonstrates how an assessment of different methods using chromatography coupled to [...]Drug testing, solar fullerenes, chemicalization is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Social impact of science The social impact of science and knowledge evolution – New research that analyses 500 years of scientific history comes to the perhaps obvious conclusion that those nations that support science and the evolution of knowledge through education, infrastructure and funding, produce stronger societies the members of which have a better standard of living and are [...]Social impact of science is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Spectroscopic science news These are my links for July 30th from 18:21 to 18:27: Space balls redux – I've reported on this briefly elsewhere, but here are more details of the research involving infrared spectroscopic data from the planetary nebula Tc 1 in the southern constellation Ara that revealed convincing evidence that the fullerenes, C60 and C70, are [...]Spectroscopic science news is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Are spiders repelled by conkers? Arachnophobics the world over have often turned to a folk tale that suggests placing conkers along one’s skirting boards or at the edges of doorways might somehow deter spiders from entering a building. The modern scientific brain might wonder whether it is some odour chemical released by the fruit of the horse chestnut tree that [...]Are spiders repelled by conkers? is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Risky teams, forged banknotes, frost-proof frogs An eclectic mix of science snips from Sciencebase: Novel algorithm cuts the risks of choosing ineffectual team members – The risky business of putting together a team Counterfeit spectroscopy – Banknote counterfeiting is a growing problem for fraud investigators across the globe and criminals involved in this highly profitable system are constantly developing their techniques [...]Risky teams, forged banknotes, frost-proof frogs is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cialis in glass and a shortage of helium These are my links for July 23rd through July 26th: ACS and RSC Sustainability Alliance – The Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Chemical Society have joined forces to launch a sustainability website. Be interesting to know what is the carbon footprint of this endeavour and the server electricity bills… Carcinogen suspects – A [...]Cialis in glass and a shortage of helium is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Headhunting goes automatic for the people Very few people work alone in the so-called knowledge economy. Even a lowly freelance science writer has a network of editors, publishers and other associates on which they rely to get their words out to an audience. The point is even more apparent in the world of research where often vast teams of experts must [...]Headhunting goes automatic for the people is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Sweet sensors Nothing new under the sun, as the bard said, and how true it is sometimes. No sooner had I posted a news article on spectroscopynow.com entitled “Sweet sense of GOD” than Santhosh Challa, a Senior Scientist at Merck & Co in New Jersey, USA, got in touch to tell me that his team had also [...]Sweet sensors is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Just say no to sunscreen nanophobia! Once again we’re at a pivotal point in human development, where a novel technology might allow us to improve the lot of millions, perhaps billions of people across the globe and yet activists are invoking the precautionary principle and informing consumers of the possible dangers therein. As happened with vaccines, nuclear energy, genetically modified crops, [...]Just say no to sunscreen nanophobia! is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Spectral science news These are my links for July 15th from 12:27 to 12:32: Herpes invasion – There are eight herpes viruses that cause human diseases. Depending on how they affect us, they result in oral and genital herpes, the latter of which is present in almost a third of the US population. Currently, there is no cure [...]Spectral science news is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Science careers, damping and oil My latest editorial contribution to Materials Today and a little more oily news. Paradigms, peers, and patents – For every paradigm-shifting breakthrough in science there are a plethora of failed experiments, myriad grant applications, patent pressures, and the activation energy barrier that is peer-reviewed publication to overcome. So with all those issues to face is [...]Science careers, damping and oil is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Extraterrestrial molecules and the plausibility of life on earth Latest scientific news with a spectroscopic angle Extraterrestrial molecules – An astronomical infrared study reveals one of the most complex organic molecules yet found in the interstellar medium – anthracene – offering possible new clues to the way the building blocks of life might have emerged. Wrinkles improve spectra – Polydimethylsiloxane can be used to [...]Extraterrestrial molecules and the plausibility of life on earth is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Molecules, materials and British science This is my first batch of delicious science links for this week: Dendrimersome library – A library of supramolecular materials that can form hollow vesicles with potential in therapeutic drug and gene delivery, imaging diagnostics, as well as the cosmetics industry has been developed by researchers in Finland and the USA. Telescopic eye implant – [...]Molecules, materials and British science is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Switching off the Intute Spotlight These are the last physical sciences news headlines I’ll publish for the Intute (previously PSIgate) site. I’ve written for the organisation on a pretty much monthly basis for the last decade, first as PSIgate Spotlight, then as Hot Topics on Intute. But, July 2010 is the last issues as Intute goes into statis for a [...]Switching off the Intute Spotlight is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Summer science reading Following on from yesterday’s summer book review, we go from inner space to outer space: Exploring the Solar System with Binoculars: A Beginner’s Guide to the Sun, Moon, and Planets by Stephen James O’Meara. Stephen James O’Meara shows you how to observe our Solar System’s wonders with ease, using nothing more than the unaided eye [...]Summer science reading is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Wot gorilla? The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. This book by the psychologists who ran the famous Gorillas in our midst experiment tell us that they found that half the people asked to count passes among one team missed seeing a person in a gorilla suit stride [...]Wot gorilla? is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The hidden, invisible, and private web Everyone knows that Google and the other search engines between them crawl, spider, and slurp up the whole internet, right? Wrong! The millions of websites that are obviously available on the internet are readily searchable, Google Bing, Yahoo, and their ilk have seen to that, we can usually find documents, pages, digital images, videos, music, [...]The hidden, invisible, and private web is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with Sciencebase on Facebook and TwitterC ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website DNA search, iPhone chemistry, electronic waste Latest bookmarked science news, including my current Alchemist column on ChemWeb.com: How to build a better DNA search engine – The techniques for indexing Chinese language websites could dramatically improve the speed of bioinformatic searches, according to research by SOSO, the third largest Chinese search engine The chemistry of an iPhone – Steve Jobs responds [...]DNA search, iPhone chemistry, electronic waste is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect wi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 10 Herbal remedies, cohosh or tosh? Is there any significant evidence that any of the following herbal remedies actually work in treating the conditions with which they’re associated? Aloe vera for treating minor burns, including sunburn – 2009 review concludes: “some promising results with the use of aloe vera for diverse dermatologic conditions, clinical effectiveness of oral and topical aloe vera [...]10 Herbal remedies, cohosh or tosh? is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with S ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Watery calendar girls draw chemical structures A few more science stories that caught my eye this week FieldView – Cresset Group – Free download release of FieldView, a new molecular viewer/editor that is designed to show molecules with their associated field patterns and physicochemical properties. Watery no-man’s land – Physical chemists know water to exist in 15 distinct phases, now research [...]Watery calendar girls draw chemical structures is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Intute hot science for flaming June Delicious science links, including my latest news review for Intute Hot Topics: Low-temperature fraud detection – A low-temperature plasma probe can identify art fraud without damaging the artwork, which is important should the work turn out to be genuine. Flat-packed particles – Graphene is a material comprising sheets of carbon just one atom thick; graphene [...]Intute hot science for flaming June is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with Sciencebase ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 4 tips for a healthy barbecue The BBC weather team promise us a barbecue summer almost every year, and although we do get the occasional patch of warmth, it’s never quite as sunny and warm in the days and balmy and calm in the evenings as it is in the US or Australia where the BBQ expert is truly the culinary [...]4 tips for a healthy barbecue is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with Sciencebase on Facebook and TwitterClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The push and pull of third world drugs Diseases can be classified as Type I (those that are incident in both rich and poor countries); Type II (those that are incident in both rich and poor countries but with a substantial proportion in poor countries, for example tuberculosis [and malaria]) and Type III (those that are overwhelmingly or exclusively [...]The push and pull of third world drugs is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with Sciencebase on Facebook and TwitterClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Enzymes, chemicals, and metal vapours Latest science news from yours truly on SpectroscopyNOW.com Don’t get your kinases in a twist – New drugs that block kinase enzymes irreversibly could be used in cancer therapy as well as in studying how this class of enzymes functions. An informatics analysied has allowed molecular editing to produce novel leads. X-rays spot left and right handed [...]Enzymes, chemicals, and metal vapours is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with Sciencebase on Facebo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Three decades of major oil spills How does the ongoing saga of the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon disaster compare with three decades of major oil spills. An infographic from the oil spill timeline page of Iglu Cruises provides a visual comparison using data apparently sourced from the BBC. Unfortunately, the Iglu graphic somewhat distorts [...]Three decades of major oil spills is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with Sciencebase on Facebook and TwitterClick her ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Materials, nanotechnology, iPhone app Science news links for June 3rd through June 8th, including my latest contributions to Materials Today magazine: Nanotechnology fights cancer – Functionalised single-walled carbon nanotubes, rather than being a health risk, cause T cell antigens to cluster in the blood and stimulate the body's natural immune response. Flat-packed carbon – Synthesising and isolating new forms of pure [...]Materials, nanotechnology, iPhone app is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You ca ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Testing tests Teaching is meant to help students learn, usually about a specific subject, but more broadly about social interactions, working in a team, under duress, about life in general. They say that your schooldays are the best days of your lives, but perish the thought I’ve never been one for clichés and that one smacks of [...]Testing tests is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with Sciencebase on Facebook and TwitterClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website My latest SpectroscopyNOW science news These are my links for June 1st from 19:03 to 19:09: Therapeutic science – X-ray crystallography has been used to determine the structure of a new, improved protein that could be employed in the purification of therapeutic antibodies and to reveal details of its complexes with antibodies. The work represents an improved molecular design based on [...]My latest SpectroscopyNOW science news is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with Sciencebase on Facebook and ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mumps, vax, quacks #science A few science news snippets: Mumps vaccination and teenage swelling – Clinical evidence suggests that we should best avoid mumps in teenagers, could a booster vaccine at age 12 or thereabouts be the answer? Martin Gardner RIP – Debunker of quacks and pseudoscientists and an unequalled mathematical raconteur, he will be missed. Electronic blast for superbug killers and [...]Mumps, vax, quacks #science is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with Sciencebas ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website ChemistryViews, Alchemist, espresso ChemistryViews just launched, so here’s my first link to my stuff on there together with the regular Alchemist round-up and a surprising finding about espresso. Small molecules for fighting cancer – My first short feature article in the all-new ChemistryViews magazine from Wiley covers research into tumor necrosis factor (TNF-alpha) Alchemist news – This week, The Alchemist [...]ChemistryViews, Alchemist, espresso is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also con ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Wheels within wheels – the scientific lifecycle An oft-repeated message from scientists involved with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), mapping the human genome, the search for extraterrestrial life and other vast scientific projects, such as supercomputing experiments is that the tera-bytes, peta-bytes, perhaps even the yotta-bytes of data generated by large-scale projects is hard to handle, to say the least. Not only has [...]Wheels within wheels – the scientific lifecycle is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also con ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Chemical structure drawing poll Yesterday’s blog feature quoted my various contacts on Twitter, LinkedIn and elsewhere on what program they use to draw chemical structures. There were some interesting answers, including mentions of sites like ChemSpider and PubChem that are no drawing packages per se but do allow you to retrieve a vast array of molecular structures. Today, I thought [...]Chemical structure drawing poll is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with Sciencebase on Facebook and Tw ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Draw chemical structures Chemical structure drawing is one of the most consistently popular search terms on Sciencebase and gets a lot of search engine traffic for those pages, so it seems worth revisiting the topic from a different perspective. Of course, with the likes of PubChem and ChemSpider now available one might wonder whether there is any need [...]Draw chemical structures is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with Sciencebase on Facebook and TwitterClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Getting wood Wood is the focus of new research into biofuels, while removing toxins from other crops is important for biofuels and food supply. Forest fires and phosphorus are analysed while the route discovered to taken by aluminium through the aquatic foodchain might quell some pollutant fears. This week’s column on SpectroscopyNOW.com: What’s wood worth? – X-ray technique [...]Getting wood is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with Sciencebase on Facebook a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Tellura, angiogenesis, favourites Tellurium steroids, angiogenesis against cancer, favourite chemical things and more… My name is tellura – Drugs based on tellurium catch the eye of Derek Lowe Antiangiogenic "anticancer" foods – Can eating these foods help prevent pin-head sized cancers that grow in people from gaining the blood vessels they need to grow into something malignant? In other words, [...]Tellura, angiogenesis, favourites is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect w ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website My favourite chemistry things Sceptical Chymist tells me (via Twitter) that they were enjoying the favourite things about chemistry meme started by ChemJobber and continued by Azmanam (known to Sciencebase readers for his chemical spelling dictionary and the C+EN team. As is the wont of meme creators, you pay it forward and have to come up with your own [...]My favourite chemistry things is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with Sciencebase on Facebook and TwitterClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Submarine eruptions, hybrids, and quarks The first three links are to my latest column on Intute is now online: Scrubbing up knowledge of submarine volcanoes – Consider the simple pumice stone next time you're having a bathtime scrub… Metallic liquid crystals – A new class of materials formed by combining liquid crystals and metal clusters glow intensely red and in the infra-red [...]Submarine eruptions, hybrids, and quarks is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with Sciencebase on Fa ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Submarine eruptions, hybrid materials, and quarks The first three links are to my latest column on Intute is now online: Scrubbing up knowledge of submarine volcanoes – Consider the simple pumice stone next time you're having a bathtime scrub… Metallic liquid crystals – A new class of materials formed by combining liquid crystals and metal clusters glow intensely red and in the infra-red [...]Submarine eruptions, hybrid materials, and quarks is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with Scienceb ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Metal, quantum dots, and life on earth Latest science news with a spectral twist from my column on SpectroscopyNOW.com and more… X-ray fuel – X-ray absorption spectroscopy, XAS, has been used to probe the metal centre of an important enzyme that can oxidise methane, natural gas, to methanol. Turns out the metal is copper not iron as previously thought and the discovery could [...]Metal, quantum dots, and life on earth is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with Sciencebase on Facebook and Twi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website April Alchemist Arrives The Alchemist travels back billions of years to the dawn of life this week to learn how aspartic acid may be the crystal Eve, the mother of all chirality while heading back to the future also discovers how biology and nanotechnology might be fused to produce new metamaterials for a range of medical and analytical [...]April Alchemist Arrives is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with Sciencebase on Facebook and TwitterClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nuclear reactors and soft X-rays Science links for this week, including my latest news in Materials Today Self-powered sensors: Biomaterials – Piezoelectric arrays could provide the power for a lab-on-a-chip device Pushing droplets around: Surface science – Pushing droplets around a surface A safe reaction: Nuclear – Self-healing materials could make nuclear power plants safer Atheist sex – So…which students are having the most [...]Nuclear reactors and soft X-rays is a post from: Sciencebase ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Lifelong learning is about connecting people Individuals now have the autonomy to make their own learning choices and in recent years there has been an emphasis on the “self made learner”, especially in adult education and ongoing professional development. As such, online communities and other so-called web 2.0 tools have come to the fore as potentially useful for educators and students [...]Lifelong learning is about connecting people is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with Sciencebase on Facebook and ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Lifelong learning online is about connecting people Individuals now have the autonomy to make their own learning choices and in recent years there has been an emphasis on the “self made learner”, especially in adult education and ongoing professional development. As such, online communities and other so-called web 2.0 tools have come to the fore as potentially useful for educators and students [...]Lifelong learning online is about connecting people is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Hubble enhanced, open science, bogus research These are a few of the science stories that caught my eye this past week: Hubble’s 20th anniversary treat – A stupendous image of a distant region of space, colour enhanced (of course) but amazing nevertheless. Draft White Paper – Researcher identifiers – How about a "SciID", like OpenID or a DOI but for identifying individual researchers? [...]Hubble enhanced, open science, bogus research is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog You can also connect with S ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Hubble enhanced, open science, and bogus research These are a few of the science stories that caught my eye this past week: Hubble’s 20th anniversary treat – A stupendous image of a distant region of space, colour enhanced (of course) but amazing nevertheless. Draft White Paper – Researcher identifiers – How about a "SciID", like OpenID or a DOI but for identifying individual researchers? [...]Hubble enhanced, open science, and bogus research is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Online students and virtual supervisors The numbers of international students taking on graduate degrees is on the increase, partly due to the advent of rapid communication and information tools and partly due to the recognition that globalisation is taking over the world. Hah! Supervisors I’ve spoken to over the years have always seen the mix of cultures in their laboratories as [...]Online students and virtual supervisors is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Alchemist, catching electrons, homeopathic fantasies This week’s Alchemist chemistry news and more… Catching electrons in the act – Scientists are getting close to being able to study chemical reactions and complex materials with individual attosecond pulses of laser light (that's a quintillionth of a second). Here's how Berkeley scientists are doing it… Alchemical happenings from around the web – The Alchemist could [...]Alchemist, catching electrons, homeopathic fantasies is a post from: Sciencebase Sc ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Alchemist, catching electrons, homeopathic fail This week’s Alchemist chemistry news and more… Catching electrons in the act – Scientists are getting close to being able to study chemical reactions and complex materials with individual attosecond pulses of laser light (that's a quintillionth of a second). Here's how Berkeley scientists are doing it… Alchemical happenings from around the web – The Alchemist could [...]Alchemist, catching electrons, homeopathic fail is a post from: Sciencebase Science ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Smoking cadmium and benchtop X-rays Latest science news including this week’s round up from my SpectroscopyNOW column: Smoking out cadmium problem – A statistical analysis of spectroscopic data is helping scientists home in on the problem of decreased fruit and vegetable consumption being associated with an elevated concentration of cadmium in the blood of male smokers. Short, sharp outburst – A new [...]Smoking cadmium and benchtop X-rays is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Young children see the moon illusion Why does the full moon seem bigger when it’s near the horizon than when it’s high in the sky? The moon illusion, which also applies to the perception of the size of the sun in the sky, has intrigued artists and puzzled psychologists for many years. The moon illusion refers to the fact that the sun [...]Young children see the moon illusion is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Eye disease, combat robots, and a battery boost Latest round-up of science news, including my Intute physical sciences news column. ETROP Study MNR – Treatment strategy confirmed for childhood eye disease Reviewing peer review – Scientific peer review has many problems and no one seems to know how to address them Bots High – A documentary on high school combat robots The slow rise of The Andes [...]Eye disease, combat robots, and a battery boost is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How Many Licks? The idea of carrying out a Fermi estimate sounds like something that only nuclear physicists would be able to do with any degree of success, but a Fermi estimate, or Fermi problem, is nothing more than an approach to estimating numbers that cannot be counted. For instance, how many grains of sand on a beach? [...]How Many Licks? is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Open Laboratory 2009 The self-proclaimed “best in science writing on blogs” brings us once again a wide range of posts from the great and the good of the scientific blogosphere. The project was started with Bora Zivkovic (Blog Around the Clock) who recognised that science blogs were taking on a more and more relevant role in the sharing [...]The Open Laboratory 2009 is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Element 117 Element 117 discovered, ancient climate, change, and intute’s green service. Elemental discoveries – element 117 – An international team of scientists from Russia and the United States, including two Department of Energy national laboratories and two universities, has discovered the newest superheavy element, element 117. Ancient climate change – Does the Earth follow a 100,000-year climate-change cycle? Switch [...]Element 117 is a post from: Sciencebase Science Bl ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Spectroscopy Now Latest science news from David Bradley with a spectroscopic bent… Muscling in on the mussels’ grip – Spectroscopy has been used to probe the chemical composition of the cuticle of the common bivalve mollusc commonly known as the mussel. The research provides the first direct evidence that the cuticle has a protein-based polymeric scaffold stabilized by [...]Spectroscopy Now is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Press releases should be about people We’re all increasingly familiar with corporate press releases. There are countless websites that regurgitate the corporate and institutional public relations output for wider and wider audiences. If you’re familiar with the blogosphere, you will almost certainly recognise that many posts simply echo the notices provided by the likes of Eurekalert, AlphaGalileo, and the more generic wire [...]Press releases should be about people is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Climate emails, MS trek, Gulf Stream safe Latest science news snippets Hacked climate emails – Hacked climate email inquiry clears Jones but questions remain Trekking for multiple sclerosis – Wendy Booker (wendybooker.net), is determined to change the face of MS. Her mission? Climb the Seven Summits—the highest mountains on each continent; making her the first person with an MS diagnosis to do so. Expectations [...]Climate emails, MS trek, Gulf Stream safe is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to pla ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Materials, water, and light Some scientific links from this week, including my Materials Today news round up. Periodic Table of Parodies – Yet more periodic table fun and games Similar websites to Sciencebase – This neat little tool automagically works out your site's keywords and searches for other sites with the same keywords The long and winding road to synthetic silk – [...]Materials, water, and light is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Awards, PTs, and green phones Awards – Research Blogging – Winners and finalists in the Research Blogging Awards 2010 announced today! A Clever Periodic Table from Sciencebase | Genome Alberta Education – It's official. My periodic table of science bloggers is clever, even if it maybe didn't include enough Canadians. Go Green! Use the Internet on your mobile phone – Nokia claims [...]Awards, PTs, and green phones is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Periodic table of science blogs Many, many thanks to everyone who joined in the fun and frolics in helping create the Periodic Table of Science Bloggers. I cannot quite believe how quickly it got filled – 118 elements – having only started it on Friday after a spate of periodic posts. Thanks for all the tweets, suggestions, retweets, comments and emails. [...]Periodic table of science blogs is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Chemical science, night sky, scientific trust Delicious links March 16-18 Chemical Science – Building linear polymers from monomers, inaugural paper in RSC's new journal Bing maps now let you scan the nighttime sky – The stars are coming out tonight…even when it's cloudy Sex and social networking – Patterns of prostitution revealed by analysis of social networking site has important implications for spread of [...]Chemical science, night sky, scientific trust is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClic ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Periodic Table of David Bradley Given the intense interest and heated debate surrounding an old Sciencebase post about novel periodic tables, I thought I’d have a bit of fun with one of my own…click on an orange element to visit one of my links. If you’ve got a chemistry/science blog and your initials or its initials fit one of the elements [...]The Periodic Table of David Bradley is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Periodic Table of Science Bloggers UPDATE: I’ve made a start adding other science types to the Periodic Table of David Bradley. If you want on, let me have me your blog link, social media site or whatever, and tell me which element you are (preference given to those where blog’s or your initials fit an element). Gold squares are mine, [...]Periodic Table of Science Bloggers is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Real chemistry at the periodic table party Teaching chemistry has changed so much since my day. This classic Youtube clip highlights the way the elements might interact at a periodic table party. Carbon is popular with the hydrogens, the noble gases are the emo wallflowers, but it’s the fight that breaks out between potassium water that even had my teenage son laughing. [...]Real chemistry at the periodic table party is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What causes the seasons? Outside the tropics we experience four seasons – Spring, Summer, Autumn, or Fall, and Winter. These occur because the Earth’s axis about which it rotates once a day is tilted at an angle relative to the Earth’s orbit around the sun. Because the axis always points towards the north star throughout the year, the seasons [...]What causes the seasons? is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Antimony, x-rays, childhood obesity Science news links for March 12-15, including the latest on my SpectroscopyNOW.com column: Feverish New World X-ray – X-ray crystallography has allowed US researchers to discover exactly how one type of New World hemorrhagic fever virus latches on to and infects human cells. The work offers a much-needed lead for new treatments. Marking up childhood obesity – [...]Antimony, x-rays, childhood obesity is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Total alchemist A good, old-fashioned total synthesis of a natural product caught The Alchemist’s attention this week, as did the notion of spiking the hydrocarbon picene with potassium atoms to turn it into a superconductor. In a related carbon field, Chinese chemists have broken the rules to crack bucky eggs and US scientists have looked to molecular midwifery [...]Total alchemist is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Whatever happened to the audiophile? Back in the 1970s my parents had friends who had stacks of hi-fi separates with gold contact wiring and speaker stands on metal spikes. They were only playing Perry Como on vinyl, but that was their idea of fun, so good luck to them. When the CD emerged on to the market with its claims [...]Whatever happened to the audiophile? is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Forensic saliva test within spitting distance The latest issue of SpectroscopyNOW is online. This week I cover everything from MRI for testicular cancer to egg-shaped carbon balls by way of energy molecules, copper proteins, secret writing, first up a forensic test for distinguishing saliva deposits from other substances at a crime scene: Non-destructive spit test – Raman spectroscopy can identify samples of [...]Forensic saliva test within spitting distance is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Hacking your online identity Geo-location services are very useful, helping you find a post office, ATM, decent restaurant, or hooking up with friends. They are commonly used in conjunction with smart phones and other mobile devices that ping your location (based on network coordinates or the global positioning system, GPS) back to the owner of a given system. Location-based services [...]Hacking your online identity is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Time-keeping alchemy Time-keeping with quantum mechanics caught The Alchemist’s eye this week with a truly long-term view while secret writing that uses a mix of sunscreen and boron could lead to new scratch and read products. Ionic liquids hold much promise in gas chromatography of biofuels, we learn, and a lethal combination of anticancer drug and protein inhibitors [...]Time-keeping alchemy is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Four ways to connect with Sciencebase Related Posts:Recognisable scientists versus artistsRSS Awareness DayRoyal stamps for Royal SocietyBerlin Wall falls in AustraliaA month with an electricity monitorFour ways to connect with Sciencebase is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog Four ways to connect with Sciencebase is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Royal stamps for Royal Society Royal Mail Stamps has issued a commemorative set of stamps in the UK to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society this year. The stamps feature ten of the most prominent fellows of the Royal Society: Robert Boyle – Chemistry Sir Isaac Newton – Optics Benjamin Franklin – Electricity Edward Jenner – Vaccination Charles Babbage – Computing Alfred Russel Wallace [...]Royal stamps for Royal Society is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Shedding light on photosynthesis The rules have changed regarding photosynthetic law, The Alchemist learns, while it turns out that plants use steroid hormones just like those found in mammals. Another type of plant could lead to a novel anticancer drug. In polymer news, an approach to locking in plasticizers could eradicate problems associated with PVC in toys and medical devices. [...]Shedding light on photosynthesis is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Interviewwith David J Newman (Pt. II) This is Part II of the unabridged transcript of an interview with Dr David Newman, Chief at the Natural Products Branch of the NCI in Maryland. The interview was conducted for a new quarterly newsletter– Chemistry Matters. You can read Part I in which Dr Newman discussed how natural products can lead to novel [...]Interview with David J Newman (Pt. II)is a post from:Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A natural interview with David Newman David Newman is Chief at the Natural Products Branch, Developmental Therapeutics Program, DCTD, at the National Cancer Institutes in Frederick, Maryland, USA. I interviewed him for Issue 1 of a new quarterly newsletter called Chemistry Matters in Pharma. This is Part I of the unabridged transcript of that interview in which Dr Newman told me of [...]A natural interview with David Newman is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Prostate problem probed Pinpointing prostate problems – The chemical cousin of magnetic resonance imaging, MR spectroscopy, could be used to pinpoint the exact location of prostate cancers and to determine the aggressiveness of a tumour without major surgical intervention, according to research published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. “Magnetic resonance (MR) spectroscopy which can analyse the biochemistry rather [...]Prostate problem probed is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Summer born lucky are born rich If you want to feel lucky in life, make sure you are born to well-off parents and don’t worry about whether you’re birthday is in the summer or winter. In 2005, well-known psychologist Richard Wiseman and his colleagues surveyed 30,000 people via the internet to see if there is a relationship between the season in which [...]Summer born lucky are born rich is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A chiefly natural interview with David Newman (Pt. I) David Newman is Chief at the Natural Products Branch, Developmental Therapeutics Program, DCTD, at the National Cancer Institutes in Frederick, Maryland, USA. I interviewed him for Issue 1 of a new quarterly newsletter called Chemistry Matters in Pharma. This is Part I of the unabridged transcript of that interview in which Dr Newman told me of [...]A chiefly natural interview with David Newman (Pt. I) is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Correct your chemical spelling mistakes Chemist Adam Azman contacted me more than two years ago to ask if I knew of a free or open source chemistry spellchecker custom dictionary for Word or OpenOffice. Searches had revealed only paid-for dictionaries. We both agreed that a free chemical spellchecker would be very useful to all scientists working with chemicals, so Adam [...]Correct your chemical spelling mistakes is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nerdy passwords, secure and memorable WARNING: Do not simply use the formula of a common chemical without obfuscating it in some way. It could be dictionary cracked very easily if you do. Coming up with a secure password that cannot be bruteforce or dictionary attacked but that is easy to remember is quite troubling. So, here’s the nerdiest approach yet. Think of [...]Nerdy passwords, secure and memorable is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How to get your fill of Sciencebase goodness Do you lie at wake at night worrying that you might have missed the latest words of wisdom on Sciencebase? Are you concerned that a new post might have published that you desperately wanted to comment on and now it’s too late? Well…fear not. There are so many ways to connect with Sciencebase and sibling [...]How to get your fill of Sciencebase goodness is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Making carbon dioxide useful My SpectroscopyNOW column is now live. This week self-perception, trapping and using carbon dioxide, cosmic coronene, mopping up radioactive caesium, photosynthesis and magic spectral lines: Red lenses – US scientists have used MRI to show that apparently the less you use your brain’s frontal lobes, the more you perceive your behaviour through rose-tinted spectacles. They publish [...]Making carbon dioxide useful is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Science based risk assessment Ask people why the enter the lottery and they will usually tell you that “you’ve got to be in it to win it”. As far as it goes that’s true, but it still doesn’t get around the odds of you picking the right numbers being vanishingly (although not quite homeopathically) small at 14 million to [...]Science based risk assessment is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Early Valentine’s Alchemist The Alchemist this week learns of a golden opportunity to make a fundamental industrial feedstock, ethylene, from natural gas, rather than oil. In microfluidics, a droplet of acid finds its way out of a maze, while an accidental mineral could become the material of choice for magnetic tunnel junctions. In the zone between chemistry and physics, [...]Early Valentine’s Alchemist is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How to teach physics to your dog There have been rough guides, books for dummies, even howtos for idiots, but Chad Orzel is probably the first to take explain an important corner of human endeavour solely to his dog in How to teach physics to your dog. Ironically, the subject on which he focuses, physics, is a realm usually the preserve of [...]How to teach physics to your dog is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Research Blogging If you blog about peer-reviewed research, then you’ve probably heard about ResearchBlogging.org by now. It’s an aggregator that pulls together posts from around the world that have added a snippet of code to identify themselves as blogging about peer-reviewed research. The keen-eyed regulars among you will have spotted the occasional “green-tick” icon next the references [...]Research Blogging is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Melamine’s on sale again The Associated Press and others are reporting that milk products tainted with the toxic chemical melamine are on sale again in China. Melamine-tainted milk products have been pulled from convenience store shelves in southern China more than a year after hundreds of thousands of children were sickened in a massive milk safety scandal, a government spokeswoman [...]Melamine’s on sale again is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Indian urban wetland heavy metal A study of heavy metal contaminants in the urban lakes of India, particularly around Bangalore have revealed that attempts at mitigation meant to remove these pollutants have not so far worked and may not be a long-term remedy for the problem. I’ve provided more detail on the analysis in the Atomic ezine on SpectroscopyNOW this [...]Indian urban wetland heavy metal is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Alcoholic drug discovery truths As with much of medical science, the appearance of a fascinating research paper and an accompanying press release do not usually mean that a new pharmaceutical intervention, a medicine, is ready to be prescribed to patients on the very day that the paper appears. The drug discovery, research, and testing processes are much more long-winded [...]Alcoholic drug discovery truths is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Chemophobia and risk As a chemist by training, I’ve always been loath to give credence to unfounded criticism of synthetic chemicals that might stoke up chemophobia. Indeed, on several occasions I have written about how our bodies have evolved to cope with all kinds of chemicals regardless of whether they are synthetic or “natural”. I’ve never been a [...]Chemophobia and risk is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Intute Hot Topics My latest news round up on the Intute website is now live: Getting a grip on catalytic troublemakers, detecting toxic compounds in chlorinated water, and a trip to the Martian lake district. Related Posts:Moon, Earthquakes, Chemical WeaponsBasic Chemistry ResourcesIntute hot topics in physical scienceIntute Hot Topics is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog Intute Hot Topics is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Scientists torn between cash and kudos With ailing banks propped up by billions in taxpayers’ money and nations rolling through the mud of economic recession is it any surprise that we get mightily frustrated to hear of their enormous bonuses and golden pension pots? Of course not… But, here’s a thought… As the lines drawn between commercial and academic research become increasingly [...]Scientists torn between cash and kudos is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cancer, pneumonia, regulations, theranostics The 1st of January issue of SpectroscopyNOW is live: MRI nanoparticles seek and destroy cancer cells – A single nanoparticle can be tracked using real-time MRI as it homes in on cancer cells. A fluorescent dye used to tag the nanoparticle couples with heat therapy to kill the targeted cells. Naomi Halas and Amit Joshi of [...]Cancer, pneumonia, regulations, theranostics is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Classic musical science and Stradivarnish It won’t necessarily be music to the classical purist’s ear, but chemists have been instrumental in revealing the secret beneath the varnish on a Stradivari violins, and the secret is: there is no secret. Antonio Stradivari is perhaps the most famous instrument maker of all time. He is especially celebrated for his violins, which he made [...]Classic musical science and Stradivarnish is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Most useless machine ever The most useless machine ever has rapidly become the internet’s first viral hit of the New Year. Essentially, it’s a little wooden box with a switch, but you’ve got to watch the video to see it in action:But, of course, it’s anything but a useless machine, it’s the embodiment of at least one principle of [...]Most useless machine everis a post from:Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Intute hot topics in physical science Over on the Intute site in the physical sciences section you will find the December science news round up from yours truly: What’s the buzz at the LHC? – After a frustrating false start, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) finally got it up and running in its underground home at CERN on the Swiss-French border near [...]Intute hot topics in physical science is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Five-step plan for green design I recently saw a research paper discussing the lack of tools for designers hoping to make their products greener, more environmentally benign, sustainable even. The paper focused more on the likes of coming up with a green espresso machine and offered a five-step scheme for getting the green credentials booked into a the design and [...]Five-step plan for green design is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Happy Solstice Event Wishing all readers, commenters, contacts, fellow tweeps and scientwists, Facebook fans, and friends everywhere a happy mid-seasonal, solstice feast event from sciencebase.com… …I couldn’t just say Happy Christmas could I? It’s not as if it’s scientifically possible to reconcile a belief in any archaic mythology with observational data concerning the nature of reality. Regardless, lacking such [...]Happy Solstice Event is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogCl ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Religious science and other science books Having posted about atheism recently on the SciScoop science forum, it seems quite apt to have received for review a couple of books with a religious theme at this time of year. The first is The Faith Instinct by Nicholas Wade. Wade is a well-known New York Times writer who presents the case for an evolutionary [...]Religious science and other science books is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Myrrh, bones, and medical waste Hepatic epiphany for myrrh – A statistical analysis of experimental data on laboratory animals shows that the resin of the middle-eastern tree Commiphora, better known as “myrrh” can act as a protective antioxidant against liver damage caused by organic lead compounds. Myrrh is a rust-coloured resin obtained from several species of Commiphora and Balsamodendron tree, [...]Myrrh, bones, and medical waste is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 25 Scientific musos or 25 musical scientists Science is fun, but there are times when even the most dedicated begoggled labcoat wearing bench monkey has to relax and lots of science types seem particularly drawn to playing music. Now, I’m not saying any of these people are bench monkeys, but they do all play music, as far as I know: harpistkat Kat Arney London Harpist, [...]25 Scientific musos or 25 musical scientists is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Thinking about electric vehicles Electric vehicles reduce noise and local air pollution, such as nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and ground-level ozone, but do they simply relocate the carbon tire-tracks to fossil-fired power stations or are there benefits on the global scale? Fundamentally, an electric engine can achieve 85 to 90% energy conversion efficiency, which contrasts starkly with the internal combustion [...]Thinking about electric vehicles is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website SEVI and HIV Kicking off my SpectroscopyNOW ezine updates this week with an item on how NMR may have unravelled why some people are more susceptible to catching HIV than others. Then there is the MRI work that shows that for obese people BMI (body mass index) is a very poor indicator of heart disease risk based on [...]SEVI and HIV is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Party tricks for scientists Any one of these tricks from Richard Wiseman is sure to get you dozens of swooning fans at a solstice-event party, as long as you don’t burn down the house while doing the tricks with lit matches. Classic tricks including balancing forks on a matchstick, relighting a candle without touching it, snuffing candles with bicarb and [...]Party tricks for scientists is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Sciencebase blogging schedule This is the Sciencebase blogging schedule for the remainder of 2009: Sciencebase.com Dec 8 – Science news round-up with a spectral twist Sciencebase.com Dec 9 Electric vehicles better than hybrids? ImagingStorm.co.uk – Dec 10 Science of sepia-toned photography Sciencetext.com Dec 15 Cathartic emails for overworked journalists Sciencetext.com Dec 16 Tips for Twitter brutes Sciencebase.com Dec 17 Pre-Xmas science book reviews SciScoop.com Dec [...]Sciencebase blogging schedule is ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Swine Flu Watch Somehow got my family enlisted on the UK’s FluWatch program. The scheme, which has members of the public monitoring their colds, sore throats, and flu symptoms is being run by University College London with various eminent medical organisations as partners. Having been invited to join by our family doctor, I registered online and within a few [...]Swine Flu Watch is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Twitter, Facebook and Sciencebase Regular readers will hopefully have spotted I’ve cleaned up the site a little recently and added a couple of new widgets to the Sciencebase sidebar menu just below the About section link to my Research Blogging posts. The first widget heralds the relaunch of the sciencebase.com Facebook fan page and its adoption of a proper URL [...]Twitter, Facebook and Sciencebase is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Absolute chemical headlines A wide range of stories again in this week’s Alchemist column on ChemWeb.com Absolute configurations reveal themselves through NMR spectroscopy using residual dipolar couplings in small molecules, according to an international team who have put it to work on an anticancer compound. Discussed also in more detail on SpectroscopyNOW.com A failed antidepressant could be marketed as a [...]Absolute chemical headlines is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Recognisable scientists versus artists According to the promoters of a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London aimed at UK Scientific Heritage: “Scientists are no longer unrecognisable boffins” thanks to the Science in Focus exhibition, which runs until 17 January 2010. Well…I take issue with that remark! Which of the following faces do you recognise? I suspect that most [...]Recognisable scientists versus artists is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Homeopathy really doesn’t work A couple of years ago, I re-posted an old article of mine about homeopathy discussing its ludicrous claims, its feeble attempts to provide a scientific explanation for those claims, and basically pointing out that no solid evidence has ever been found that infinitely diluted solutions of spurious ingredients have any more beneficial effect on a [...]Homeopathy really doesn’t work is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Latest science headlines Time to bring you up to date on the latest science headlines I’ve put together for other sites this last couple of weeks, so here’s a quick round-up: On the SpectroscopyNOW site, this issue, I covered natural chemicals that can help sunflowers soak up toxic cadmium from the soil (another example of the phytoremediation process I [...]Latest science headlines is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Genetically engineered heavy metal fans The wastewater released from industry often contains high levels of toxic heavy metals, which can kill organisms, damage ecosystems, and accumulate in the foodchain. Electroplating, lead smelting, mining, and countless other processes produce enormous volumes of such wastewater. In a perfect world, remediation would be powered by a renewable energy supply, there would be no solid [...]Genetically engineered heavy metal fans is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Juggling cancer nano news Latest news reports from yours truly on Spectroscopynow.com Juggling matters on the brain – UK scientists have used magnetic resonance imaging to reveal that learning a complex task like juggling can causes changes in the white matter in the brain. The findings could have implications for developing new approaches to neurodegenerative diseases, such as multiple sclerosis. Cancer [...]Juggling cancer nano news is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Berlin Wall falls in Australia Twenty years ago today, my girlfriend (now my wife) and I lay on a bed in a cramped backpackers’ hostel in the Katherine Gorge National Park (now Nitmiluk), in Australia’s Northern Territory, watching news of the fall of the Berlin Wall (now rubble). Outside insects were buzzing ferociously, the temperature was in the high 30s, [...]Berlin Wall falls in Australia is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Alchemical Anomalies In the current issue of The Alchemist we learn how to stick methane molecules to metals without breaking carbon-hydrogen bonds and how to make impossible carbene catalysts without the usual prerequisite of an attendant metal centre. Another seeming impossibility comes to light: a new microscopy technique for visualizing non-fluorescing biomolecules using the kind of stimulated emission [...]Alchemical Anomalies is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Twitter science list categories The manually compiled Scientwists list of science people on Twitter grew from around 100 of my contacts in January 2009 to almost 700 members, who asked to join or who retweeted the link as of October. Justin Reid helped automate the inclusion of bios and photos and 2020science did some amazing analyses to show how all [...]Twitter science list categories is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website My Whole Cell Twitter Interview Laura Bonetta wrote an excellent article for the science journal Cell recently in which she quoted various science types who use Twitter on the subject of whether or not scientists should be tweeting. It’s a topic I’ve discussed more generally regarding scientists’ use of social media and online networking communities. Anyway, she asked my opinion on [...]My Whole Cell Twitter Interview is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Categories for science tweeps Okay. Okay. Pressure was on to categorise my scientwist list…so I’ve made a start. First off, the spillover (lots of tweeps in the T to Z group from the TweepML.org version of my scientwist list, which has 650 members or thereabouts) have now each been given a category as I cannot squeeze them into the 500 [...]Categories for science tweeps is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website List categories for Twitter scientists UPDATE – NOV 5: Still working through the almost 650 members of the list, but now up to the P’s. Pressure was on from lots of science tweeps for to categorise my scientwist list…so I’ve made a start. The spillover (lots of tweeps in the T to Z group from the TweepML.org version of my scientwist list [...]List categories for Twitter scientists is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Scientists on Twitter Regulars will know that I’ve compiled and recompiled lists of science types on Twitter for mutual benefit. It started out as a list of 100 of my own Twitter friends back in January 2009, who happened to be in science and gradually grew to well over 600 members by November 2009. However, just as I migrated [...]Scientists on Twitter is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Food Chemistry News On the menu today, why red wine is a no-no when it comes to fishy cuisine, how chemists can help you improve your gravy, and a whole platter of food chemistry to tempt your taste buds: “Red wine with red meat, white wine with fish.” But, have you ever wondered why? Japanese chemists have discovered that [...]Food Chemistry News is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Don’t be such a scientist! Don’t be such a scientist! It’s the kind of thing I’d expect my sister to say to my face if I’ve gone off on one of my lecture mode conversations about some great discovery, or something some of my artier friends might whisper about me behind my back. Sometimes it’s a personal wish…but then I [...]Don’t be such a scientist! is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A month with an electricity monitor Right, the kettle is on for a morning brew and apparently our household is using 3.07 kilowatts. That will include the chest freezer in the garage, the refrigerator in the kitchen, the electric kettle, my laptop and wireless network, oh and a little device sitting on my desk right now that’s monitoring all those electrons [...]A month with an electricity monitor is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Breast Cancer, Plankton, Tellurides My latest contributions to SpectroscopyNOW.com and my current Alchemist column on ChemWeb.com are now live: Sweetening breast cancer risk – Experimental and epidemiological evidence previously suggested that circulating glucose and insulin may play a role in the emergence of breast cancer. Now a statistical analysis of baseline plasma levels of these compounds shows that elevated serum [...]Breast Cancer, Plankton, Tellurides is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Climate Change Action It’s Blog Action Day 2009 and the subject this year is Climate Change. So, here are a few resources for readers seeking out climate information: IPCC – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – The IPCC assesses the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change. EPA – The US [...]Climate Change Action is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Metal Bottle Tops and Landfill Mining Reduce, re-use, and recycle. Just one of the countless mantras of the twenty-first century that we are told will save the planet. Of course, my grandmother used to put it far more succinctly and in a much more accessible form: waste not, want not. Now, we have carbon footprints, emissions targets, and landfill directives, that are [...]Metal Bottle Tops and Landfill Mining is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Moon, Earthquakes, Chemical Weapons The media was today almost drenched with the idea that water and other wonders would be been found on the Moon, but unfortunately LXPRESS was the least moist of damp squibs ever and no 50 km plume was seen, not even a little splash. NASA scientists are trying to figure out why. Meanwhile, in the October [...]Moon, Earthquakes, Chemical Weapons is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Gen-F Scientists Ignoring Social Networking A quick analysis of online social networks, such as LinkedIn and Xing would suggest that a mere 1 in 7 research scientists use such tools as part of their work. This contrasts starkly with the business world where uptake is up to 88%. In other words almost 9 out of every ten employees in the [...]Gen-F Scientists Ignoring Social Networking is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Sniffer, E coli Clues, Graphene The second batch of physical science and biomedical research news in the SpectroscopyNOW ezines are live: Optical sniffer detects poison gas – US researchers have developed an optoelectronic nose that can sniff out toxic gases. The sensor is fast and inexpensive and could be used to detect high exposure risk to hazardous industrial chemicals. E coli clues [...]Sniffer, E coli Clues, Graphene is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Stroke, NIR, Guests My latest physical sciences and biomedical news stories for SpectroscopyNOW.com are now live. The eyes have it – US researchers have demonstrated proof of principle that a short and simple assessment of eye movements in suspected stroke patients can distinguish new strokes from other less serious disorders better than magnetic resonance imaging. The technique demonstrated only [...]Stroke, NIR, Guests is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nervous, Monopolar, Solvents Superfast fluorescent sensor molecules that detect and destroy nerve agent, chemical weapons, caught The Alchemist’s eye this week, as did new insights into the ancient oxygen levels of the early earth. A very alchemical notion emerges from Austria suggesting that life elsewhere in the universe may use sulfuric acid instead of water as its vital solvent. Spin [...]Nervous, Monopolar, Solvents is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website microRNAs Until 2001, few people had heard the term micro ribonucleic acids, but these little chunks of nucleic acid, just 21 to 23 bases long, have been conserved throughout evolution. They don’t code for proteins, but they do seem to be involved in the regulation of immunity, the development and differentiation of immune cells, antibody production [...]microRNAs is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Organic Compost Chemistry Okay…so I was kind of joking about doing a regular weekly gardening column, but having spent rather longer weeding and feeding this week than I intended to, I need to get something written for Sciencebase today that wouldn’t be too demanding. So here’s a quick guide to composting your kitchen and garden waste.These are the [...]Organic Compost Chemistryis a post from:Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Treating the Obesity Epidemic Drugmaker Vivus saw its experimental weight-loss medication, Qnexa, pass two Phase III clinical trials C&EN reported on September 10, and the company’s share price skyrocket. The rewards of developing a safe and effective anti-obesity medication will be in the tens of billions of dollars, according to Bloomberg. Of course, such apparent breakthroughs are going to hit [...]Treating the Obesity Epidemic is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Dental Lead, Lung Cancer and Monopoles This week’s ezines on SpectroscopyNOW are now live, featuring a breath test for lung cancer, magnetic monopoles, a way to boost fuel cells, and reducing toxic waste from dental surgeries. Extracting the dental lead – Lead contamination in the black paper used to mask dental X-ray paper has been determined for the first time using AAS. [...]Dental Lead, Lung Cancer and Monopoles is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Chemical-free Gardening It may come as a shock to anyone thinking of taking up gardening as a hobby or as a way to beat back the credit crunch by doing a little grow-your-own that gardening is based entirely on chemistry. There is no escaping this simple truth. Chemicals grow in the garden. There is no such thing [...]Chemical-free Gardening is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website File Sharing for Scientists In the olden days, scientists used to send out paper reprints of their research papers to colleagues…maybe they still do. I get the occasional request for such an archaic entity for the items I have had published in Science, PNAS, and other journals. These days, you’re more likely to simply ask for an eprint of a [...]File Sharing for Scientists is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Organic, Nano, Pharma Challenging natural products succumb to radical synthetic prowess, the Alchemist hears this week, while US researchers find a way to construct macroscopic crystals from tiny DNA triangles. The growing problem of obesity drug abuse in the UK is highlighted in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology and Bayer Cropscience is going underground with storage for safety [...]Organic, Nano, Pharma is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Fun Science Games It’s Friday, our kids have been back at school a week now, so with the ever-present prospect of a wet weekend ahead of us, how to distract them from Youtube and Facebook with some educational that might help them next week in school… …so, how about a quick trawl for fun science games. It seems there [...]Fun Science Games is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Babies, Smokestacks, and Kudzu Vine Tears and smiles bond secure mothers to baby – The sight of her baby’s smile or even its tears cause the reward centres in a mother’s brain to light up, according to an international functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, but only if the mother herself had a secure attachment to her own parent. Smokestack scrubber [...]Babies, Smokestacks, and Kudzu Vine is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 50 Million Chemicals and Counting UPDATE: Sept 8 – Looks like CAS Registry passed the marker while I was sleeping and now stands at – 50,002,412 organic and inorganic substances. Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) will announce the 50 millionth registered chemical substance in its Registry, tomorrow (8th September). According to the email I received from a CAS spokesman, “The number itself [...]50 Million Chemicals and Counting is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Pre-eclampsia, NIR, Nano-dots Pregnant pause for thought – The analytical cousin of magnetic resonance imaging, NMR spectroscopy, has revealed that a chemical compound found in unpasteurised food can be present at unusually high levels in the red blood cells of pregnant women. The compound, the antioxidant ergothioneine, could be used as a biomarker for the potentially fatal condition, [...]Pre-eclampsia, NIR, Nano-dots is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Biofuels vs Fossil Fuels Biofuels are not much better than fossil fuels in terms of the impact on atmospheric pollution levels and effects on climate change, according to Mark Jacobson professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. This is especially true when making claims about the sustainability of biofuels in comparison with hydrogen fuel cells and battery-driven [...]Biofuels vs Fossil Fuels is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Alchemist Checks Oxy Cholesterol Levels The Alchemist this week learns how fluorine chemistry is blooming, how to melt proteins, and how cholesterol is all about the good, the bad, and the oxy. Also this week, a technique borrowed from organic LED fabrication could lead to a new way to manufacture tiny inorganic LEDs for next generation displays, while a conductive [...]Alchemist Checks Oxy Cholesterol Levels is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Taking an Hepatic Holiday UPDATE: By sheer coincidence (I could claim prescience), the BBC is reporting that Brits are drinking more than ever on holiday. “Holidaymakers are turning to drink on their breaks with the average adult consuming eight alcoholic drinks a day, a survey suggests, which amounts to around 200 units on a single trip.” (BBC) Intoxicants have been [...]Taking an Hepatic Holiday is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website H1N1 and Glutathione Supplements Could a simple dietary change that increases glutathione, or indeed supplementation with this antioxidant tripeptide, be all you need to boost your immune system and ward of influenza? Several Sciencebase correspondents and hundreds of “bloggers” selling supplements seem to think so…but I am not so sure, despite the couple of limited research papers that they [...]H1N1 and Glutathione Supplements is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What is a Scientific Paper? David Bradley reporting from Science Online London 2009 (#solo09) The “modern” form of scientific publishing began in the 17th century when gentlemen (rare has it been a lady until very recently) with an inquisitive bent decided it would be a good idea to share the results of their endeavours among their peers, for assessment, confirmation and [...]What is a Scientific Paper? is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Toxic Sunscreen Toxic sunscreen testing – Regardless of the debate on whether or not you can have too little sunshine on your skin, it is important to remember that currently there is no standard tests for monitoring toxic heavy metals contained in sunscreen creams. Now, researchers in Greece have demonstrated that a sophisticated, but relatively straightfoward technique can [...]Toxic Sunscreen is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Digital Privacy Concerns I’ve discussed the risk of losing your job because of blogging previously. Recently though there was a case of summary dismissal by Facebook of a young British woman who debased her employer’s good character via her Wall has gained several column inches in the popular press. And, of course, we have all heard about the accommodation [...]Digital Privacy Concerns is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Unique Urine Fingerprints For decades, the word “fingerprint” has been used to denote a set of unique characteristics, whether literally the complex patterns of arches, loops, and whorls on one’s fingertips or entirely figuratively and more recently, the notion of a genetic fingerprint based on an analysis of an individual’s DNA sequence. Most recently though, scientists have turned to [...]Unique Urine Fingerprints is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Spinning Facebook and Student Grades A while back The Sunday Times got wind of a poster to be presented at a meeting by a researcher from Ohio State University. OSU posted an embargoed press release to Eurekalert and Newswise, but the Sunday Times, apparently never received that press release. Regardless, the paper put together a story with an incredible spin [...]Spinning Facebook and Student Grades is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Hot, Tardy Alchemist Bit late with the update for The Alchemist this week, had so much else to talk about before a slot was available, there was also the matter of our family vacation, hope readers find the info current enough to be of interest. The Alchemist recently learned that music could be the key to the smooth running [...]Hot, Tardy Alchemist is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Shamrock Enzyme Target for New Drugs German researchers have used the powerful analytical technique of X-ray diffraction to home in on an important metabolic reaction used by all pathogenic bacteria and the malaria parasite. The detailed structure of the IspH enzyme active site they revealed, which resembles a shamrock in shape, and has an Fe-S cluster at its core, could offer [...]Shamrock Enzyme Target for New Drugs is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website PLoS ONE Impact Factor and Page Rank As far as I am aware, the online, interactive, open access journal PLoS ONE (Public Library of Science ONE), has not yet been given any love by ISI, the Thomson Reuters company that doles out impact factors to journal publishers. Impact Factor is strange. It shares some of the characteristics with the so-called page rank value [...]PLoS ONE Impact Factor and Page Rank is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Yet More Summer Science Books In Einstein’s theory of relativity, energy is equivalent to matter, they’re essentially synonymous and in his famous equation Energy (E) is proportional to mass (m), with the square of the speed of light (c2) being the proportionality constant E = mc2, in other words…but why? Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, in the imaginatively titled “why does [...]Yet More Summer Science Books is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Internal Fingerprints, Brain Flu, and Mars Bonus Saturday science news post from my virtual desktop with a spectral hint all published on SpectroscopyNOW this morning: Insider fingerprints – An Italian and German research team has used NMR spectroscopy to fingerprint a person’s metabolic phenotype. Their work shows that while the range of metabolic products and their concentrations varies significantly from person to [...]Internal Fingerprints, Brain Flu, and Mars is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to pla ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website We must stamp our ecological feet Sciencebase has been focusing on various environmental and third world problems recently. I say third world, because much of what is euphemistically described as the developing world is sadly not developing at all. If the switch from third to developing has done nothing but salve the conscience of the so-called developed world, then it is, [...]We must stamp our ecological feet is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Scientific Knowledge Quiz As we’re in a testing frame of mind, I thought I’d discuss a little quiz that was published as a kind of quasi-scientific assessment of intellect. The basic premise was to find out whether you, the participant, knows more science than the average American. In The Science Knowledge Quiz you’re asked 12 questions, that most Sciencebase [...]Scientific Knowledge Quiz is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How Old is Your Heart? There are lots of online health tests available, some I’ve reviewed on Sciencebase over the years, such as those that help you answer the question are you at risk of diabetes. Often they are created and publicised by a medical charity, occasionally they are marketing devices posted by companies hoping to sell more of their [...]How Old is Your Heart? is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Alchemist Taking the P The current issue of my Alchemist column on ChemWeb.com is now online: The old alchemist’s trick of attempting to use urine as a starting material for all kinds of products could offer the twenty-first century a golden opportunity, we learn this week, while electrospinning DNA nanofibers might shed white light on new technologies without requiring a [...]Alchemist Taking the P is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Counterfeit Drugs Digital industries continue to wage an unwinnable war against the people and organisations that illicitly copy, share, and sell their products, whether DVD rips, DRM-free music files, or pirated software. But, while arguments about lost revenues, performing rights, and the rest of it rage, at least digital copyright theft is not usually a matter of [...]Counterfeit Drugs is a post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Tenth Anniversary Elemental Discoveries, the precursor to this blog, existed in various forms on the AFN, the Tallahassee Freenet and enterprise.net from Spring 1996. But, today (July 20) is the official tenth anniversary of when I registered the sciencebase.com domain. At that point I started to get serious about building up a science portal (as they were [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Swine Flu Trending Again The UK media has been full of swine flu (H1N1) again this week, it’s been trending, to borrow Twitter terminology, what with reports on the tragic deaths of a young girl and a family doctor, advice on virulence and research from Imperial College London that suggests we need better research into the disease. Widespread anecdotal [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Stinging Heavy Metal Resistance Head-banging science news with a spectroscopic bent from my latest posts on the SpectroscopyNOW ezines, live June 15. A medical tale in the sting – The venom of the eusocial bee contains three novel antimicrobial compounds known as lasioglossins, which have been structurally characterised by NMR spectroscopy. The compounds offer a new avenue for developing new [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cooking up Solar Solutions Solar power need not be complicated. Research into complex materials that convert the energy from sunlight into electricity is well underway, but offers only low efficiencies. In contrast direct heating of water sidesteps the intermediary of converting sunlight into electricity and then using that to power a heating element in a water tank. All you need [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website More Summer Science Reads Summer science reading requires a sequel as I suspect most of you have read all the previous recommendations for science books, or if you haven’t you’re not likely to pick them up now. So here are a few more choice tomes. In this 40th anniversary year of the first manned moon landing, Jim Bell brings the [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Three A’s of Food Security Famine, drought, disease, crop failure, they might afflict any one of us, but in the developing world and on the margins of urbanised regions, the issue of food security is paramount for survival. There are three main factors to consider when one thinks of food security each of which must be addressed to offer a [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Homeopathic ER Last week, I heard Simon Singh at the World Conference of Science Journalists discussing the state of England’s libel laws, chiropractic, and more. At least I assume that’s what he was discussing, the acoustics in the conference centre were terrible and he seemed to be showing a Katie Melua video at one point, and my [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website World Conference of Science Journalists Just back from the 6th World Conference of Science Journalists in London this week. Tired, suffering the after-effects of overheating in old London buildings with no air conditioning, such as Westminster Central Hall. Regardless, it was an excellent conference, a great opportunity to meet a hugely diverse range of people. Some of them old friends known [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Giant Sperm, Ultrasonic Brain Surgery, and Oil Giant sperm – Some animals supersize their sperm. Microscopic freshwater ostracods, such as Eucypris virens, for instance have filamentous, spiralling sperm cells that can be up to ten times the body length of the organism itself. The longest known ostracod sperm cell is 10 mm long. How big would a human sperm have to be [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Metal, Aerosols, and Biggy Smalls World Conference of Science Journalists in London this week, so here’s a sneak preview of the July 1 issue of SpectroscopyNOW from the David Bradley segments in celebration. Wish me luck in defending my corner against those who would smite the science writers from our midst… Iron proteins cast in surprising role – Iron is the [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cats, The Matrix, and Acid Drops The Alchemist learns of a scalable cat this week as well as how the matrix is all important when it comes to identifying metabolites in a single drop of blood. A small follow-up trial for prostate drug abiraterone demonstrates quality of life improvements in patients with the aggressive form of the disease, the same drug might [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Village Archaeology Archaeologists were out in force in our village once again, this past weekend. This time their mini dig was part of our four-day Fen Edge Family Festival, for which I was one of the team of official photographers. A metre-square hole was dug on the edge of Cottenham Village Green and it was quickly discovered just [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Life (and Death) on the Ocean Wave To predict the height of crests and the depths of troughs of ocean waves, scientists can turn to the well-known work of German mathematician and scientist Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss. The so-called Gaussian function provides a mathematical formula from which one can determine the normal distribution of wave heights based on probability theory and statistics. Gauss [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Aviation Radiation Redux In May, I reported that Russian scientists at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Biophysics in Pushchino and the Institute of High-Energy Physics in Protvino, had investigated the chronic effects of the radiation to which we are exposed every time we fly in high altitude aircraft. They wanted to know if any putative damage [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cannabis Cancer, Toxic Waste, Antibiotics The latest science news with an analytical bent from yours truly, now available in the SpectroscopyNOW ezines: Cannabis blow back – A highly sensitive new chemical test has allowed European scientists to obtain “convincing evidence” that marijuana smoke damages DNA in ways that could increase the risk of cancer. Toxic shock – Researchers in Spain are evaluating [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Short, Sharp Alchemist Natural quasicrystals, graphene interconnects, and photo-powered nanomotors all come into view through The Alchemist’s eyeglass this week. Also in view, is the finding that hydrogen peroxide is more than a bleach, it’s a marshal for white blood cells to flood to the body’s injury sites. Solar-powered humidity on tap might help solve pure water shortages in [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cloud Spotting Cloud appreciation…it doesn’t quite have the same image as other hobbies, rock climbing, sky diving, fell walking, fly fishing. Cloud spotting is almost on a par with training spotting or stamp collecting, you might think, but just a single hour spent on your back almost anywhere in the world staring up at a cloudy sky can [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website H1N1 Swine Flu Update Many virologists, including Vincent Racaniello, have suggested that the threat of avian influenza (H5N1) was greatly overestimated and so distracted us from more serious threats. Back in early 2005, he suggested that another strain might underpin a pandemic, such as H2N2, it may yet do just that. In the meantime, he was essentially right in [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website ChemTweets and Scientwists I was interviewed by Faith Hayden for this week’s Chemical & Engineering News on the subject of, you guessed it, science on Twitter. This link is now free to view. Here’s a transcript of my interview: How long have you been Tweeting? I joined Twitter in June 2007 under the pseudonym “@sciencebase“, which is the name of my [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Can Death be Sustainable? A case study Few people like to dwell on the subject of death, but it’s up there alongside taxes with life’s inevitabilities. But, consider it we must, for the sake of the environment. At some point in our primordial past the dead were left to the scavenging dogs, the vultures, the flies, and the microbes. There were [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Summer Science Books None of the new science books on my desk this morning are more than an inch thick, so they should make great lighweight packing for a summer holiday read. First up, It Takes a Genome by Greg Gibson, Professor of Genetics at North Carolina State University at Raleigh, explains why a clash between our genes and [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Red Hot Spectral Alchemist This week, The Alchemist learns of encapsulated capsules that could emulate cells, a new glassy material for preventing debilitating leaks in solid oxide fuel cells, and a computer model that might help us develop a vaccine for H1N1 type A influenza. Also, under his gaze are ionic liquids developed to dissolve wood and the cancer [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Curious X-shooter Antibiotics A sneak preview of my spectroscopyNOW ezine headlines for June 1: Bi-curious microcylinders – A team in the US has produced micrometre-wide discs and elongated rods from bi-coloured and multicoloured compartments. The composite materials could have novel applications in diagnostics, drug delivery, and a new type of display technology. X-shooter snap the cosmos – The European Southern [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Fear of Flying Personally, I’ve never had a problem with a fear of flying, a lot of people suffer from this often debilitating phobia though despite reassurances about road death statistics being much worse than air crashes. That said perhaps there is one aspect of flying that should be of concern – exposure to radiation from outer space, [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Pathogen Insecurity and Bio WMD Marc Ostfield is the Senior Advisor for Bioterrorism, Biodefense, and Health Security, US Department of State, Office of International Health and Biodefense in Washington DC and believes that the concept of biosecurity as a primary strategy to combat terrorism is nothing more than an illusion. As a concept biosecurity, also known as pathogen security, suggests that [...]Post from:Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Light, Trials, Balls In my SpecNOW science news column this week: C60, C80, C0, Go! - X-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and other techniques have allowed German chemists to demonstrate their synthesis of the first non-carbon analogue of the C80 fullerene molecule. And yes, the title is an allusion to the Malcolm McClaren fashion vehicle of the post-punk [...]Post from:Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Backyard Archaeology This weekend we, and a dozen other properties in our village, hosted a team of archaeologists from the University of Cambridge. The team, led by Dr Carenza Lewis (well known to Time Team viewers), were intent on unearthing the secrets of the centuries locked in our gardens. So, armed with mattocks and buckets, we mucked [...]Post from:Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Heavy Metal Packaging Researchers in Argentina have developed a new approach to testing food packaging for trace amounts of the toxic heavy metal cadmium. Cadmium is one of several additives used extensively in the manufacture of plastics. Regulations limit the concentration of cadmium allowable, of course. In the European Union that limit is 100 milligrams per kilogram. But, the [...]Post from:Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mercury, Climate Change, Cosmos Mercury seals, ancient climate change, and even older microwaves, all feature in my Spotlight column over on Intute, this month. Mercury seals - The Polar Bear has often been given the role of proverbial environmental canary, coming to prominence in the movie An Inconvenient Truth by former US Vice President Al Gore. But, researchers in Canada [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Slumdog Engineer Having discussed the possible environmental risks of charitable aid in the form of obsolete electronic goods to the developing world, it seemed to timely to mention other research looking into strong solutions to some of the critical problems facing people in many parts of the world. Researchers, Priti Parikh and Allan McRobie, in Cambridge, England, suggest [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Charity Computers and Environmental Waste Charitable schemes to send unwanted electronic equipment, including mobile phones and computers to the developing world could be creating more environmental problems than they solve if the equipment becomes entirely obsolete in a short time. Researchers in India have carried out an evaluation of the trade-offs between cost and environmental risks to prove the point. There [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Swine Flu Update Swine flu (H1N1) information leaflets are being delivered to households across the UK today. I suspect they do nothing but increase fear and confuse people, especially as the WHO/UN are about to lower the swine flu alert level. In the UK, 27 people now have the virus, with 23 in England and four in Scotland and [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website SciScoop Science Forum Relaunched Sciscoop.com - the Science News Forum - was relaunched in on May 1. I gave the site a seriously long overdue makeover, re-themed the site, switched to new web hosting, and rebuilt everything from the ground up with the amazing technical assistance of my friend Ariel to make the most of advances in web content [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Spectral Alchemist This week, it’s my The Alchemist chemistry news column that coincides with SpectroscopyNOW updates: The Alchemist this week catches site through his spyglass of complex interstellar molecules with a hint of raspberry and rum, and a possible way to capture carbon usefully that doesn’t require huge energy input. Geordie scientists have discovered why a breakfast fry-up [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Raspberry Ripple Galaxy Recently, an innocuous-seeming press release was released by German astronomers announcing that they had found two of the most complex molecules ever in space - n-propyl cyanide, more commonly known to chemists as butyronitrile, and ethyl formate. Now, butyronitrile is a nasty poison with a characteristic odour and I’m sure you’d get a whiff of [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Swine Flu FAQ Swine flu could be the next major disease epidemic. It appears to have emerged in Mexico has killed more than 100 people and infected more 1000 who have recovered. Cases and suspected cases have now been identified in the USA, New Zealand, France, Scotland, Israel, Spain, and elsewhere (see the swine flu outbreak Google Map). In [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Swine Flu Forget avian influenza, it is swine flu that could ravage the world as Mexicans are warned not to shake hands in church and have been told to keep at least six feet of separation between each other, and to wear protective masks. Large public gatherings, such as sporting events and concerts, have been banned and [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Talking Computers with Spam-fisted Luddites Most of you will be familiar with the concept of tools from primitive hand axes, clubs, and even prehistoric smoothie makers, we humans have used them for millennia (and if you’ve noticed several animals use them too). Of course, our tools have grown exponentially more and more sophisticated, so much so that we now have [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website More Stupid Science My previous post on stupid things people have done in the lab as a kind of Darwin Awards for scientists was described by Guy Kawasaki, of Alltop fame. It also seemed to be so popular a post with lots of people sending me their own anecdotes that I thought more stupid science would be a [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Arsenic, Aminos, X-ray, Teasing I was offline with my family last week, walking and drinking ale in Derbyshire, so I’m a bit late in alerting you to my latest news stories on SpectroscopyNOW, they went live in my absence. So here’s the catchup: Tyson’s toxic technique - The first accurate test for arsenic compounds in contaminated soil has been developed [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Spotlight on the Alchemist My April Spotlight on physical sciences news is now available as is this week’s Chemweb Alchemist. Under the Spotlight: Pores for thought - A solid, but sponge-like material has been synthesised by chemists in Singapore. The silica-type material has the most complicated pore structure ever reported… Chips are down and, eventually, out - Graphene is a modified form [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Developing Digital Divide Are digital inclusion projects in the developing world booming or are they doomed to failure? That’s the question asked by legal expert Dinusha Mendis of the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK. Mendis has investigated the digital divide in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nigeria, and how laws such as those governing intellectual property rights and copyright [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Stupid Science As a follow up to last week’s resurrected laboratory advice column - Wear Goggles - here are a few tales from the bench, that may convince you to take that advice. When you get down to it, science is simply about real people in real laboratories trying to figure out how the world works and [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Everybody’s Free to Wear Goggles For the chemical class of 1999… More than a decade ago, American journalist Mary Schmich offered her advice to youth in the form of a spoof graduation speech centering around the crucial maxim ‘wear sunscreen‘, the article was published in the Chicago Tribune. As is the way with these things it struck a chord among the [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Flatus Impudicus, Plume-seeking Insectibot It’s a crude schoolroom axiom around which many an adult pub debate might also revolve: He who smelt it, dealt it. However, there is a serious side to quickly locating the source of noxious odours in an indoor environment of varying airflow, as Zhenzhang Liu and Tien-Fu Lu of The University of Adelaide, Australia, will attest. [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Science Books, Hayfever, and Plectrums I’ve let quite a pile of review books accumulate on my desk again as well as a couple of non-book oddities, so here’s a quick round-up. First up is the Instant Egghead Guide to the Mind by Emily Anthes published by Scientific American. The first in a series, Anthes breaks down the overwhelming topic of mind [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Bond, Q, and Controlled Cleavage Bond, Q, and controlled cleavage - US chemists have made an iron catalyst that can be used to rapidly break strong carbon-hydrogen bonds within molecules, up to one thousands times faster than other methods. The research could solve one of the great chemical challenges. Depressing brain scans - The first study of its kind has used [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Dehydrated Water Meanwhile, I have been trawling the medical and scientific literature for more than two decades, hoping to spot a genuine medical panacea that might also be used to get greasy deposits off your kitchen surfaces. Now, is the time to reveal what I’ve found Hydridic Oxygen(II) Subhydrate (HOS). This dessicated compound is astounding. It looks and [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Dawkins Delusion On sibling site Sciencetext.com I talk tech, which often includes warning people about spams and scams and, of course phishing. So, it is with some embarrassment that I confess to being slightly caught off guard by a new twitter follower with the handle @richard_dawkins. He followed me first, a fact revealed by the excellent Topify [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Earth Hour Is Earth Hour a great way to raise global awareness of how much energy we are wasting and the possible consequences or our actions? Or, is it simply a cop out so that we can all feel we did"our bit" for the environment without expending any real effort? With just hours to go for us [...]Post from:Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Copper Tone Alchemist Spring has sprung for the Alchemist, who, under the northern sun, takes on a marginal copper tone this week. First up, a new copper catalyst that can take a sideways swipe at organic aromatic compounds and make them go all meta. We also have copper nanorods for 3D computer chips. After two decades of trying, it seems [...]Post from:Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Very Personal Data Rights Across the globe privacy laws and property rights are confused. Having usually been established in centuries past it is unlikely that any established legal system can cope easily with the requirements of the digital age. Nowhere is this more likely to hold true than when discussing the use of peoples’ biometric information, which are very [...]Post from:Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Disease Mongering or Medicalization The medicalization of many social facets of our lives, multitasking pharmaceuticals and disease mongering are problems we should face head one. The overlap between business ethics and medical ethics represent a moral minefield. Nowhere more so than in the domain of newly recognised and previously untreated disorders, syndromes and diseases, among them social anxiety disorder, non-physiological [...]Post from:Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Recognising Eight Funny Patterns A horse walks into a bar, orders a beer, and the bartender asks…Bud or Miller? Of course, you know the real punchline…the bartender actually asks the equine punter“why the long face?”. There, that’s two of the world’s eight jokes in the first sentence. According to evolutionary theorist Alastair Clarke there are only eight types of [...]Post from:Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Spicy Disciplinarian Four more fascinating research discoveries feature in my column on SpectroscopyNOW this week, covering research into the medicinal effects of curry powder, cyst analysis, why nicotine does not kill instantly, and bristling nano balls. The spicy disciplinarian - Solid state NMR has been used to explain why curcumin, one of the physiologically active components of the [...]Post from:Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Alchemist Goes Green This week The Alchemist goes green offering a survey of environmental news related to the chemical sciences. First up is the development of porous materials that can extract hydrogen from mixtures of gases. Next, solar energy could be used to convert the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide back into useful hydrocarbon fuel methane, while chicken manure offers [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Staying in with Friends on a Wireless Mesh The difference between staying in with friends and going out? Obvious, really. But, translate that idea to networks and you have the basis of self-organized virtual communities, according to Panayotis Antoniadis of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris France. Writing in the IJWBC (reference below), Antoniadis and Benedicte Le Grand discuss the bootstrapping problem [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Converting Carbon Dioxide “Nothing beats finding vast lakes of oil for the pumping, or vast deposits of coal for the digging; thanks mother nature!” proclaimed Craig Grimes of Penn State University in an emailed response to my skeptical question regarding his work on catalysts that can convert the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into a fuel, methane. I report on [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Baffling Fluid Dynamics During my student days, one of the most obviously complicated and beyond-comprehension modules was that on fluid dynamics. It’s not surprising that it was complicated and beyond comprehension, the way fluids (gases and liquids by definition) move is not simple. There is no single, straightforward equation that can describe the flow of water cascading down waterfall. [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Wireless Probing, Shiny Bugs, Remote Scanning Probing the brain wirelessly - IR-absorbing lead selenide particles form the basis of a method for the study of neuronal activation in samples of brain tissues without the need for hard-wired electrodes. The technique instead utilises light-triggered nanostructured semiconductor photoelectrodes to probe activity. Propagation improves MRI, allows remote scanning - Swiss researchers have succeeded in exciting [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Scientific Locations Mapped I’ve made a Google map showing important scientific locations - scientific locations. Recently, a fellow singer in the Cottenham Big Mouth collective was telling me about a Google map he’d created with all his favourite eateries that do live jazz, sounded groovy man…but although I love food and don’t mind a bit of jazz, I thought [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website You Can Call Me Al Algebra, alchemy, alcohol, aldebaran, alkali, Alhambra, algorithm, Algarve, and, of course, albatross. One thing in common…they’re all “al” words, and what is “al” you ask? It’s simply the Arabic definite article, it’s the “the”, in other words. Which means that all those words have “the” in their etymology. So, when Sir Isaac Newton was referred to as [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Alchemist Turns Polyphile A quite gratifying email from Professor James E. Hanson of Seton Hall University made me realise that I’d gone all poly with The Alchemist column this week: As a polymer chemist myself, I really liked this issue of The Alchemist - or rather in this case the “polyalchemist” newsletter. Except for the beaver pheromones, each [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Developing Health Compulsory licensing is one of those euphemisms that hide a whole raft of issues. By definition - it is “authorisation to a government or company to make and sell a pharmaceutical drug without the permission of the patent holder”, which makes the intent clear. In its most obvious form, compulsory licensing is what occurs when a [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Thick Skinned Geordies A week or two ago the British media was full of the story of scientists hoping to discover why the indigenous people of Tyneside are wont to few clothes even in the briskest of breezes and the worst of winter cold snaps. If you’ve been out on the town in Newcastle any time of year, [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Whatever Happened to SARS? In 2004, I did some reportage for the Royal Society from their meeting on emerging viral infections. The meeting was held just after the worldwide SARS outbreak that threw nations into chaos and had the more susceptible parts of the media hyping the end of the world. Of course, SARS, an emerging pathogen, was lethal [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Alchemy, Spectroscopy, and the Hash In the latest ezines from SpectroscopyNOW: Magnetic drug delivery for Alzheimer’s disease - Tiny pieces of magnetite incorporated into chitosan microparticles could act as efficient drug-delivery agents for the Alzheimer’s drug tacrine. Tacrine has notoriously low oral bioavailability and unclear efficacy but this delivery approach boosts uptake. Contrasting tumours - US scientists have successfully predicted the outcome [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Stormwater Artwork Earlier this year Laura Haddad of Haddad|Drugan emailed me with an unusual request regarding crystal structures. But, before I tell you about that, here’s a little background. Laura is working on an artistic installation called “Undercurrents”, that will be the basis of the public art component of a stormwater treatment facility on Seattle’s Elliott Bay. The [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website R&D People Matter In the long-gone days of my Catalyst column on the original ChemWeb.com, I wrote about how R&D was becoming a distributed endeavour. It was going the way of large-scale data problems that are best solved using a distributed computing environment, or Grid. Now, roughly a decade later, it seems the management of globally dispersed R&D [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Astronomy to Zoology, Poetically I’m trying to work out whether I’m a bad science journalist or not…scary thought. If I am, then I’ve wasted the last 20 years of my life. I started out specializing in chemistry, that was my field. But these days, I cover science much more broadly, although I do still tend to do more chemistry than [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Online Health in the Developing World Following on from Monday’s post about health information on twitter, it seemed a nice coincidence that I came across a research paper focusing on healthcare information available in the developing world. The web is still relatively young and yet many people can barely remember a time when they could not simply click a mouse and gain [...]Post from:Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Health and Medicine on Twitter My good friend Jo Brodie who works at DiabetesUK and twitters as @JoBrodie was crucial in helping publicise my recent scientists on twitter page. She recently gave the list a shout out on the PSCI-COM science communicators discussion group and added a few science tweeps of her own and a few in the health and [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Science News Updates My latest science news updates are now available on SpectroscopyNOW.com and ChemWeb.com, covering a wide range topics from date rape drug analysis to DNA that behaves parasitically and could underpin speciation and evolution: Date rape analysis - Raman spectroscopy can be used to identify the date rape drug GHB and its precursor GBL in spiked drinks [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Salt Lowers Freezing Point of Water This morning, my kids are listening eagerly to the local radio to hear if their school will be closed? Why? Because we’re in England, a few millimetres of snow has fallen, it’s a little chilly, and the nation in in chaos. Airports are shut, driving conditions are almost impossible, and schools are closing across the [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Green Mercury Light Bulbs With regulations set to ban incandescent light bulbs, the illuminating invention we’ve used since the nineteenth century, a replacement is needed. LEDs hold promise but are dim compared with the bulbs they seek to replace. Compact fluorescent tubes, are a bright idea. They are essentially a miniaturised version of the strip lighting by which shoppers [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Autism Saliva Test I recently reported on the spit test being developed for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It’s in the very early stages of development (this is not an antenatal test), but the details were certainly of interest to the target audience on the SpecNOW site. Of course, the mainstream media picked up on the news of the possibility [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Catching Obesity UPDATED: Is it possible that obesity, like the common cold is infectious? You’d think so if you believed research that’s been carried out over the last decade and hits the tabloid headlines again this week. The research suggests that a highly infectious virus might be behind some cases of obesity. There is constant talk of an [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Two Decades of Science Communication Today is my twentieth anniversary as a science writer-editor and yet it seems like only yesterday that I walked into the editorial offices of the Royal Society of Chemistry, having abandoned the chemical lab in favour of publishing on 23rd January 1989. A fateful day. Not only did it represent a permanent move to Cambridge [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Full Metal Alchemist First story to fall under the gaze of The Alchemist this week is synthetic HDL, a potential alternative therapy for cholesterol problems wrought through gold nanotechnology. Next, we hear of atomic ink that avoids the push and shove of microscopic manipulation by introducing the metallic nano swap meet. Bed bugs, are apparently evolving resistance to second-generation [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Melamine Milk Update More than 200 families whose babies were hospitalised after drinking infant milk formula tainted with the industrial chemical melamine are taking their case to China’s highest court after being repeatedly ignored by lower courts, according to an AP report. An earlier report revealed that the parents of an infant who died after drinking melamine milk have [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Transplant Spectroscopy Yellow and black bile were considered by the ancients as two of the four vital humours of the human body along with phlegm and blood. Ancient and mediaeval Greco-Roman alternative medicine. Imbalances in these humours caused illness. The Greek names for the terms gave rise to the words “choler” (bile) [the prefix in cholesterol, of [...]Post from: Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Win Sputnik Mania On 4th October 1957, the Soviets made the shock announcement that they had sent the first craft ever into orbit around the Earth. The Americans were stunned, how could the USSR have stolen a march on them in this way. That shock then turned to fear with the realisation that the Soviets were obviously that [...]Post from:Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Sciencebase on an iPhone If you happen to have one of those luxurious portable gadgets, like an iPhone or the slightly less luxurious Google Android, then you can now read your favourite Science-based blog without all the visual effects simply by loading up the following URL - http://m.sciencebase.com for the mobile version of the site. For those who care about [...]Post from:Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Physical Spotlight The January issue of my Intute Spotlight column is now live 3D astrophysics - Astrophysicists are using a novel 3D computer visualization technique to help them understand the role of gravity in the formation of vast, stellar nurseries, also known as molecular clouds.… Cosmic nanodiamonds - Tiny particles of crystalline carbon found in sediments at six [...]Post from:Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website All Top Science As some of you will know, Guy Kawasaki and the team at Alltop.com added the Sciencebase newsfeed to their excellent virtual magazine rack in the Science section. You may not be aware of the many other science-related sections on the Alltop.com site, so here’s a short list: Biotechnology, includes headlines from FierceBiotech, ScienceDaily, My Biotech Life Nanotechnology, [...]Post from:Sciencebase Science BlogClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Scientwists I carried out a little ad hoc experiment in social media this week. Having backed up my twitter friends and followers using Tweetake, I figured it was time to make them earn their keep…I jest. No, seriously, I’d downloaded the lists, which come as CSV files you can open in a spreadsheet program, and just [...] ScientwistsClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Alchemical Start to the Year The Alchemist took a seasonable tipple over the holiday period but discovered that he needn’t have splashed out on all that expensive wine thanks to the field effect. He also discovers that all those spent coffee grounds he produces could be harvested to make biodiesel and hears of plans to rejuvenate the Baltic Sea with [...] Alchemical Start to the YearClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Reflecting on Climate Change A radical plan to curb global warming and apparently reverse climate change caused by our rampant burning of fossil fuels since the industrial revolution would involve simply covering large areas of the world’s deserts with reflective sheeting. The idea is discussed in detail in the January issue of the International Journal of Global Environmental Issues and [...] Reflecting on Climate ChangeClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Leukemia Tweezers The first 2009 issue of SpectroscopyNOW is now available: Tweezing out leukemia spectra - US researchers have used laser tweezers Raman spectroscopy (LTRS) to help them characterize the effects of different chemical fixation procedures on the spectra of healthy cells and leukemia cells and to avoid the misinterpretation of data. Crime and punishment - A truly interdisciplinary [...]Leukemia TweezersClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Happy New Year Best wishes from me, David Bradley, for the coming year. Thanks for all your support and comments in 2008 and let’s hope for even more exciting science, technology, and medical news in 2009 Happy New YearHappy New YearClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How Alternative Medicine Fails Us I’m forever fending off the alternative medicine brigade who seem to clump around this website and email me all kinds of supposed miracle cures that will spell the end of all health ills. One herbal remedy I recently focused on is Rhodiola rosea, in which I critiqued a promotional email from a vested interest in [...]How Alternative Medicine Fails UsClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website K Barry Sharpless Live A recent live Webcast gave Professor K. Barry Sharpless, the 2001 Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry, the opportunity to explore the intricacies of scientific discovery and how it is that when observation is concerned, good luck favours only the prepared mind. Neither the vidcheeo nor the sound quality are great…but you cannot have everything. The organisers also [...] K Barry Sharpless LiveClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website New Year Science Books If you’re New Year’s resolution is to read more books, then check out the latest additions to my bulging shelves, order them quickly on Amazon and you may just have them in time to fulfill that New Year’s resolution: Experimental heart - a racy read set in the world of pipettors and gene splicing, a first [...] New Year Science BooksClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Sperm, Discharge, Heroin, and Alzheimers Batteries are included (unfortunately) - A chemical cocktail of toxic gases is released when you burn alkaline batteries, according to the latest research from Spain. The investigating team highlights the issue with respect to municipal waste incineration, which is used as an alternative to landfill and suggests that recycling is perhaps the only environmentally viable [...] Sperm, Discharge, Heroin, and AlzheimersClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Alchemy Under the Spotlight This week, The Alchemist is digging in the dirt to find out about the carbon cycle and climate change, taking his whisky (or is it whiskey) with or without water, and discovering how to juggle molecules, on the other hand. Also in biochemical news this week, the crystal structure of a plant hormone receptor is [...] Alchemy Under the SpotlightClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Rx Reviews Redux A new(ish) website has launched that aims to provide unbiased patient-generated data on the benefits of 7000 prescription medications and their side-effects. Rateadrug.com hopes to do for pharma products what dooyoo and ciao do for gadgets by bringing the crowd to the debate. Patients can anonymously rate and review any of the prescription drugs they take [...] Rx Reviews ReduxClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Chemistry Dictionary 2.0 Earlier this year organic chemist Adam Azman contacted me to ask if there were a free or open source chemistry dictionary available for word processors. Well, a quick search revealed only paid-for dictionaries so he set about creating his own chem dictionary, from scratch. Version 1.0 was hosted on Chemspy and Sciencebase until recently. But, [...] Chemistry Dictionary 2.0Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Social Media for Science Librarians I’m still following the social media for scientists trail and asked my good friend Roddy MacLeod of Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, who runs the Internet Resources Newsletter whether he had any thoughts on gathering up social media resources and scientists into a directory or other online resource. It would be useful, for instance, to know which [...] Social Media for Science LibrariansClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Water of Life A while back, I visited the Bushmills whiskey distillery (it was my second visit in as many decades) always a pleasure, especially the tasting panel at the end of the tour just before you spend all your money on, ahem, souvenirs. Whisky is a broad category of distilled drinks made from fermented grain mash and aged [...] Water of LifeClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Top Ten Science News Posts It’s that time of year again. The shops have been full of Xmas crap joy for weeks, as have I, of course. The neighbours have been through Osram’s full stock twice with their religiously ambiguous, exterior decor, and now I’m filling a Sciencebase blog post with the classic end of year round up - the [...] Top Ten Science News PostsClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Dioxins in Pork Dioxins Before Swine - Irish pork is off the menu, according to the BBC. The UK’s Food Standards Agency is monitoring pork products in the Irish Republic because of fears of contamination with dioxins. “Tests showed some pork products contained up to 200 times more dioxins than the recognised safety limit.” Interestingly, dioxin levels in [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Flu Structure, Mp3s, and Magnetic Minestrone You can read my latest science news updates in spectroscopynow.com: One flu over - X-ray studies have revealed details of the structure of a protein used by the avian influenza, H5N1, that allows it to hide its RNA from the infected host’s immune system. The structure could provide a new target for the development of antiviral [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Top Ten SNPs If you ever thought genetics was only about disease, then check out the popular SNPs list on SNPedia. A SNP (pronounced “snip”) is a single nucleotide polymorphism, which in BradSpeak(TM) is basically a difference in a bit of your DNA that makes you different from the rest. Anyway, here’s the Top Five SNPs that might [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Shedding Light on Neon Signs As regular readers know, I like to keep a fairly close eye on what Sciencebase visitors are searching for so that I can put together new posts that provide answers to the questions readers want answering. Recently, there has been a spate of search queries related to neon signs. Perhaps not the most exciting of [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Future Pundits are predicting that the first computer that will be at least as intelligent as a human will be built in 2010 and by 2049 a $1000 computer will outsmart the entire human race. But, this video is about more than that. It tracks the shifts that are occurring today and extrapolates them into implications for [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Religious Faith in Technology The Elucian Islands in the virtual online world known as Second Life are to host a climate change conference. Speakers will present live from Imperial College London and Stanford University in California, and researchers and university students will attend from the UK and the United States. However, another climate change conference with a difference also begins [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website This Guy Needs a Reality Check Welcome fellow twitterers, don’t forget to follow me on twitter, before you read on… In the current economic climate, the “Downturn” as the BBC has so brazenly logo-ized it, when banks are running and companies are being crunched like so many cornflakes eaten during the breakfast news, tech companies need all the good advice they can [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Breast is Best in Melamine Scandal The melamine in milk scandal continues to draw interest. You recall, across Asia, in particularly in China, infant formula milk was discovered to be contaminated with a starting material for making plastics and fire retardant materials, melamine. Thousands of babies were hospitalised with possible renal failure, and several died. But, could some good have come [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Recycled Virgins, Nano, and Trigger Points My latest science news is now online in the spectroscopyNOW ezine. This week: Recycled virgin - Recycled engine oil has high levels of organic impurities, heavy metals, and carcinogenic compounds, according to work carried out by researchers in Jordan. They have used atomic absorption (AA), inductive couple plasma (ICP) and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) analyses to [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Polymer, Nanotech, Vitamins This week the Alchemist hears how polymer chemists are turning to supramolecular chemistry (or is it supramolecular chemists turning to polymers?) to create novel flexible and elastic materials. In nanotechnology, a British consumer activist organization is calling for more safety data on nano materials used in cosmetics, and French scientists have demonstrated how nitrogen oxides [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Virtual Rehabilitation for MS Sufferers I recently wrote about how social media might help scientists do their work, so a paper in IJWBS on how those on the receiving end of medical science - patients and healthcare practitioners - might benefit from web 2.0 caught my eye. IT consultant Maire Heikkinen of University of Tampere, Finland, has focused on how the [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Vitamin D Dilemma - To D or Not To D Radiological health expert Daniel Hayes who works at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene recent published on the subject of low dose radiation and the possibility that a form of vitamin D could be the key to protecting us from background radiation and perhaps save lives following a nuclear incident or [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Scientists Socializing Online My post on social media for scientists seems to have been received rather well, with a huge amount of traffic and positive responses from various big name commentators across the networks and blogosphere. Several scientists have already commented about the post over on Nature Networks. Nature’s own Maxine Clarke describe it as “an amazingly useful post” [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Sciencebase Siblings Just a quick reminder of the various sites now associated with the Sciencebase Science Blog: Over on http://www.sciscoop.com we have an active science news forum, recently discussing everything from the morning banana diet scam to space elevators. On http://www.sciencetext.com you can find computing tips and tricks, hacks for making your blog or website work better for you [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Scuppering the Program Pirates Professors the world over are worried about plagiarism: students simply lifting huge chunks from web pages and passing the thoughts and arguments off as their own. Then there are the Professors who steal from each other and publish their work in supposedly novel research papers and books and present it at conferences as original. This [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Social Media for Scientists Towards the end of October, I received a flurry of emails asking me to check out new social networking sites for scientists, I’ve already reviewed the nanoscience community, of course. I suspect that, the academic year having moved into full swing, there were a few scientists hoping to tap into the power of social media [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Election Special Congratulations to Barack Obama and well done American, you should feel proud to voted for your 44th President in Barack Obama. But, now that’s done and dusted on with the real news: In Issue 100 of the relaunched ChemWeb Alchemist, we report on energy is top of the agenda with a record-breaking solar cell material from [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Science of Spam Who hasn’t received a spam email with some kind of clause laying claim to compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003? They usually say something about the message being anything but spam. But, it quickly becomes obvious, if you actually waste the time to read the content, that it is a generic marketing message for [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Melamine Open Secret In September, news emerged from China that thousands of babies had taken ill having drunk formula milk to which the organic compound melamine had been added. The melamine was being added by unscrupulous operatives somewhere in the milk supply chain, to artificially boost the nitrogen content of the product, and so spoof higher protein levels [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Halloween Skeletons and Reactive Chemistry In the latest scary issue of the chemistry news webzine, Reactive Reports: Dating skeletons, sticky feet for Gecko Guy, volcanic chemistry from the depths of Hades, and chasing mad cows. CSI: Waco - A statistical method that processes spectroscopic measurements very quickly could allow crime scene investigators to determine time of death of skeletal remains more [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Five-leaf Clovers An anonymous visitor to the site emailed me: “I found a 5 leaf clover… do you know anything about it? Is it good luck or bad luck?” It’s just a mutation, like the four-leaf clover, of course. The four-leaf mutation is quite rare occurring once in about 10,000 specimens. Five is rarer still. But, according to [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Revolutionary Solids History teachers can always turn to the significant figures and battles to enliven their lessons, biology education has the enormously diverse range of species to point to, and even physics can pull in metaphors and anecdotes for the more esoteric aspects, try teaching gravity without mentioning Galileo and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. But, teachers [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ayurvedic Heavy Metal Ayurvedic medicines can contain dangerous quantities of heavy metals, including lead, mercury, thallium and arsenic, clinical toxicologists in London have warned. Writing in the International Journal of Environment and Health, they suggest that recent European legislation aimed at improving safety of shop-bought products will have little impact on medicines prescribed by traditional practitioners, imported personally [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Open Access in Africa There is much talk about Open Access. There are those in academia who argue the pros extensively in all fields, biology, chemistry, computing. Protagonists are making massive efforts to convert users to this essentially non-commercial form of information and knowledge. Conversely, there are those in the commercial world who ask, who will pay for OA endeavours [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Rhodiola rosea Live long and prosper with Rhodiola rosea? I very much doubt it. R rosea (aka golden root, roseroot, h�ng j?ng ti?n in TCM) is a member of the Crassulaceae family and grows across the Arctic, the mountains of Central Asia, the Rockies, the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Carpathian Mountains, Scandinavia, Iceland, Great Britain and [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Explosive News In my SpectroscopyNOW.com column this week: US researchers have used NMR to help them develop a new high explosive material that can be melt cast into a charge with any shape (and presumably whose explosions could be monitored by the blast-proof thermometer). Nanotubes and geckos caught the eye of The Alchemist this week as US chemists [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Melamine Apology The day after yet more melamine in food warnings, this time in Bangladesh where eight imported powdered milk products have been banned and in Italy, it is reported that the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, has apologised for the Chinese government’s complacency in the melamine in milk scandal. Tainted baby formula milk has killed at least [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Science Books Once again, I have a stack of great books sitting on the Sciencebase desk ready for review. First up is Go Green - How to Build an Earth-Friendly Community, which you will be pleased to learn has been published on apparently sustainable paper. The author, Nancy Taylor, is an environmental columnist and teaches a course on [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Blog Action Day on Poverty We are, the media tells us, either on the verge or diving head first into a global recession the likes of which we have never seen. Countless financial headlines have screamed Credit Crunch, which sadly isn’t a wholegrain breakfast cereal for day-traders, for a year now. Banks are borrowing billions from taxpayers to allow them [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Melamine in the Global Food Supply While melamine in the mainstream media seems to have quietened down in the last few days, there are still a few of us in the blogosphere attempting to unravel the tangle. I first reported in my melamine in milk article (September 17) how the news broke that babies in China were somehow being poisoned by a [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Anti Cocaine, Heroin Test, and Excited Brains The latest issue of my SpectroscopyNOW column is now online. In this issue, having sampled a little cannabis chemistry last month, I turned to cocaine, and enzymes to beat addiction, and new techniques for testing the purity, or otherwise of street heroin. Anti cocaine - A mutant enzyme that breaks down cocaine in the bloodstream 2000 [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2008 The Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2008 was awarded to Osamu Shimomura (b. 1928) of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), at Woods Hole, Massachusetts and Boston University Medical School, Martin Chalfie (b. 1947) of Columbia University, New York, and Roger Tsien (b. 1952) of the University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, “for the discovery (1962 [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Melamine and Kidney Failure Sciencebase readers following the melamine story and concerned about melamine contaminated foods, will hopefully be interested in the latest expert opinion on the scandal. Roberta Weiss, a nephrologist (kidney doctor) emailed to provide Sciencebase readers with some more background on melamine contamination and toxicity. Weiss suggests that, “Probably acute renal failure resulting from cyanuric acid crystal [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nobel Prize for Physics 2008 The Nobel Prize for Physics 2008 is announced here Tuesday, October 7. The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Yoichiro Nambu (born 1921) of the Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics” and to Makoto Kobayashi (b. 1944) of the High Energy Accelerator Research [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mobile Internet Insecurities Most internet users will be unaware and unconcerned by the computer science and technology that underpins their daily web surfing, emails, chats, and Twitter updates. But, there are, of course, thousands of incredibly bright people working behind the scenes to make the internet work. One aspect of the backroom work that goes on, is the [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nobel Prize for Medicine 2008 This year the Nobel committee has awarded the Prize for Physiology or Medicine to Harald zur Hausen for his discovery of human papilloma viruses (HPV) causing cervical cancer and to Fran�oise Barr�-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The announcement was made via the Nobel organisation’s Twitter page and on [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cancer Research Blog Carnival #14 I don’t know anyone who hasn’t got a cancer story to tell, whether it is personal experience, a relative or friend, or association with their patients or through their research. Cancer has always been with us, but contrary to the popular image propagated by the mainstream media it is not a simple, nor single disease. In [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Melamine Contaminated Food List Before you check out the following items, please click here first to grab the Sciencebase newsfeed. I’ll be updating the melamine news over the next few days, and the RSS newsfeed system allows you to keep up to date with the Sciencebase site without having to check back by adding our headlines to your Google [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Double Tennis Racquet Racket I’m not sure what to make of this, but Don Mueller, of William Paterson University, New Jersey, who goes by the nickname Dr Bones sent me some video clips of what is, essentially, a new sport he invented - two-racquet tennis. Now, my first thought was: “what the flip?” But, apparently his service velocity is [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Melamine Contaminated Milk A brief summary and update to the Sciencebase original posts on Melamine in Milk and Melamine Scandal Widens. Dairy farmers have been feeling the squeeze for years, particularly in parts of the world where technological advancement has been slow in coming and so their profit margins on their milk output have not been lifted by [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Disastrous Rumours Gossip and rumours, they are the life force of cultural interaction. Just ask Guy Kawasaki, whose Truemors.com website took off last year, the hundreds of hacks who peddle the minutiae of celebrity lifestyles complete with the Photoshopped products of the paparazzi, or Perez Hilton. But, there is a serious side to rumours. In the midst [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Spectral Analysis This week in my SpectroscopyNOW column, I have four new posts covering, as usual, a wide range of solutions to scientific and technical problems. First up, is the discovery that compounds found in cannabis could lead to novel antibiotics that are less susceptible to resistance than conventional drugs. Then, we have a new type of [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Melamine Scandal Widens Four infants in China have died and at least 53,000 are reportedly ill, many seriously so, having been fed milk powder contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine. A three-year old girl in Hong Kong is also ill, but has now been released from hospital, she was the first reported case outside mainland China. Major formula [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Autumn Leaves Today, is the first day of autumn, the fall, and Google is celebrating with a new leafy logo. But, why do leaves turn red in the fall? It’s all down to chemistry. Red pigments known as anthocyanins form in leaves from many plant and tree species at the same time as the green photosynthetic apparatus [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Save Money on Gas Apologies if, like me, you’re a Brit and prefer to refer to petrol and diesel, then apologies for today’s post title. But, I’ve noticed a flurry of complaints from Americans about the price of vehicle fuel, recently, and just had to comment. Complaints about the price of gas? I hear the good folks of England, [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Water, Water, Everywhere Fresh, clean water is going to be increasingly in short supply. Despite the recent heavy rains across Southern Europe, the building of desalination plants in such regions, and the shipping in of water supplies from elsewhere is likely to increase in coming years, while desertification will maintain its dehydrating crawl and some regions of the [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Lead Astray Reminiscences on a serious Stateside gun crime: You would think you wouldn’t find a less controversial topic to write about than the analysis of heavy metals using thermal ionisation mass spectrometry (TIMS). In some ways it must sound like the dullest topic in the world, beyond those who work with MS. However, when the metal [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nutraceutical News I discovered a rather intriguing perspective on the world of wellbeing, health and nutrition in the latest issue of the journal World Review of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development (2008, 5, 104-123). In it, Sundus Tewfik of the Department of Health and Human Sciences at London Metropolitan University and Ihab Tewfik of the University of [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Sunshine Monomer and the X-ray Sidestep A simpler, gentler eye test based on Raman spectroscopy could spot ocular infection and other problems without irritating patients, although they may be required to yawn during the procedure. Whichever way you look at them, whether through the emotional blur of crying or as lachrymal secretions ripe for analysis, tears are complex. Now, researchers in [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Sex and Sin and Some Science Porn star names originally posted in August 2005, this was something of a joke post about how porn star names have become almost the  post-modern equivalent of a person’s astrological star sign, and a whole lot more scientifically valid, if you ask me, with names like Lucky Cocker and Goldie Black common. That’s despite first [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Catching the Travel Bug Long gone are the days of a summer break where the biggest health risks were stepping in donkey droppings on the beach or being sick on a fairground ride. These days, trips abroad provide the traveller with a whole range of diseases, so what’s our defence? Our first line of defence against many of these diseases [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Make Music, Boost Brain I’ve played guitar - classical, acoustic, electric - for three decades, ever since I pilfered my sister’s nylon string at the age of 12, although even before that, I’d had a couple of those mini toy guitars with real strings at various points in my childhood. I eventually learned to follow music and guitar tablature, [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Heavy Metal and Alzheimer�s More popular science news with a spectroscopic bent from the desk of David Bradley, this week: Heavy metal and Alzheimer’s - While the protein-like plaques that form in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease and in other tissues in a wide range of different disorders are well known, what is less well known is [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Recycling Science My Alchemist column on ChemWeb is live once again: This week’s award is for science that sheds light on a range of physical phenomena including liquid-metal surfaces and condensed matter. The recipient of the award, Oleg Shpyrko of the University of California San Diego, will receive the 2008 Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award from Argonne [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Stem Cell Research Lots of visitors are hitting the Sciencebase site look for information on stem cell research. It is a subject I’ve written about before, both on this site and elsewhere, but I thought it might be useful, given that my alma mater is at the forefront of stem cell research in the UK, to provide a [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Genetic Manipulation Are you happy to eat genetically modified foods? What about your friends and colleagues? Do the GM pros outweigh the cons? I asked a few contacts for some answers by way of building up to a more formal response to those kinds of questions that will be published soon in the International Journal of Biotechnology (IJBT, [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Balls to the Dinosaurs, Oceanic Oxygen, and a Nano Flush The May issue of my Spotlight column over on the Intute site is now online, this month featuring: Flush with nanoparticles - What happens to carbon-based nanoparticles when they enter groundwater? Can municipal water supplies filter them out? And, if they cannot will they cause health problems? These are crucial questions that need answers now, as [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Teatime I commented on a post on the Bad Language blog, produced by my good friend Matthew Stibbe, earlier this week. He was waxing lyrical about cutting power consumption in his SOHO and mentioned how he prefers to brew tea with freshly drawn water. I pointed out that while this may have benefits it would actually [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Accounting for Research How does one measure the worth of the science base? From the scientists’ perspective it is their bread and butter, or low-fat spread and rye biscuit, perhaps, in some cases. From industry’s standpoint, it is occasionally a source of interesting and potentially money-spinning ideas. Sometimes, it sits in its ivory tower and, to the public, [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Wrench for Social Engineering Social engineering attacks, what used to be known as a confidence, or con, tricks, can only be defeated by potential victims taking a sceptical attitude to unsolicited approaches and requests for privileged information and resources. That is the message that arrives from European researchers. Most of us have received probably dozens of phishing messages and emails [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Latest on Spectral Lines There have been 32 issues of my science news column on spectroscopynow.com since it was last officially called Spectral Lines, but I thought it was a nice name so occasionally resurrect it here when I highlight the latest research findings I cover on the site. It also gives me an excuse to re-use a logo [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website RSS Awareness Day A post from David Bradley Science Writer RSS Awareness DayClick here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Spicy Nanogoo Nanopaprika could be the key ingredient for spicing up the nanoscience and nanotechnologies communities. Site editor Andras Paszternak asked me to join just before the scientific social networking site passed the hot point of 500 members. Whether or not that nice round figure really is key to online science remains to be seen but there [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Incidents and Accidents A friend of mine who worked in a biotech lab in Europe suffered a bout of what she thought was hayfever this year…snuffling and runny nose, itchy and sore eyes, the usual thing…except this was in February! She took a few days sick leave - it was that bad - and the symptoms subsided. Until [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Biomonitors Keeping a weather eye on atmospheric pollution is a large-scale, costly and time-consuming activity. However, there just happens to be a vast network of self-contained, self-powered units around the globe that can respond to the presence of toxins, radioactive species, atmospheric particulates and other materials in the environment and could be used to build up [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Taking the P (and the N) Urine is a problem. Huge volumes are flushed, with fresh water, into the world’s sewage systems and then enormous volumes of yet more water are used to treat the waste along with solids. However, writing in a forthcoming issue of the Inderscience publication, International Journal of Biotechnology (2008, 10, 45-54, in press, fellow journalists can [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Interview with Egon Willighagen Most of you who orbit the chemical blogosphere will be well aware of Egon Willighagen’s efforts in helping us build the chemical web. Willighagen is a post-doc at the Wageningen University & Research Center in the Netherlands and cites open source programming as his main hobby. He runs a chemical blog and founded the all-encompassing Chemical [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Rebuilding the Periodic Table I’m bored with looking at the standard periodic table on my office wall. It has been useful over the years, of course, and has been exploited and sexploited too in the form of a periodic table of yoga and a sexy PT. It has also been hacked apart, cut and paste into different formats, created [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Alchemy, Hydrogen Economics, Lead-free Crime In my ChemWeb Alchemist column this week, German chemists have constructed nanoscopic balls from DNA, researchers in the UK have discovered natural antibiotics in Greek cheese that could prevent food poisoning, and Stateside, researchers have developed a low-pressure hydrogen storage material that might pave the way to a hydrogen economy (if we want it). I [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Colourful Scare Stories The British media had a feeding frenzy over artificial food colourings again last week, following pronouncements from the UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) urging manufacturers to voluntarily remove six additives from their products. The additives in question were linked in a Southampton University study funded by the FSA and published in The Lancet that linked [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Spying on the Chemical Spy Chemspy users may have noticed a few outages recently, at least on the blog section of that site, so rather than spend many an hour trying to upgrade servers, I’ve decided to re-host just the blog content from that site on Sciencebase. The databases and chemical search tools will remain in place over on that [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Balloon Party Tricks Unlike Monday’s wind power video, this one is no joke. In fact it’s testament to the strength of balloon rubber, the force of gravity, fluid mechanics, and high-speed photography. The clip lasts about 32 seconds, but the actual action is taking place in a fraction of that time. Recorded on a Photron ultima APX at 2000 [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website VRML for MEMS I first wrote about MEMS - microelectromechanical systems - some time in the early 1990s. There was a promise at the time of scalable, modular reaction units that would eventually preclude the need for chemical plants to have multi-gallon reaction vessels and enormous distillation towers. Last time I looked, most chemical plants still had those [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Doing Science An interesting item on doing science from Chad Orzel represents more than a nod and a wink to the late, great Carl Sagan, although I didn’t see his name mentioned for whatever reason. Anyway, Prof Orzel distils the scientific process down to the following and has triggered an interesting debate nevertheless: Science is a Process, Not [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Online Science For my sins, I asked another question on LinkedIn recently with the aim of canvassing opinion on how science can benefit from online social media. I posted the question in the biotech section, which seemed to be the most appropriate, they don’t have a general science category, unfortunately. So, how can science benefit from online social [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Curing Pubmedophobia Scienceroll’s Bertalan Mesk� has come up with a solution for PubMed fatigue. It’s a debilitating condition that leads to feelings of inadequacy, but it’s not the patient who feels inadequate it’s the PubMed bot itself. “For a site that is as vital to scientific progress as PubMed is, their search engine is shamefully bad. It’s [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Wind Power This experiment is closely related to the potato-powered mp3 player but not the lemon battery, so if you try this at home…well… Anyway, the set up involves a lighted candle, a couple of screws, a glass jar and lid, various crocodiles clips and wires, and a small motor with a fan. Put them altogether, break wind [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Manes, Brains and Branes I’m playing catch up, after some offline time last week (holidays, families, and illness), so today’s post is a grab-bag of the various items (mainly books) sitting in a large pile on my desk that I thought deserved a quick mention and a link or two for more information. First up: Why the Lion Grew Its [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Industrial Organic, Green Fireworks, and Unfolding Proteins I was scanning the commercial world for a change for The Alchemist’s first find this week, and learned that General Electric is hoping to revolutionize OLED (organic light emitting diode) manufacture. A chemical web pioneer is offering a solution making open chemistry commercially viable through the concept of information credits. While firework pollution could go [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Scientific Sin and Self Plagiarism One of the seven deadly sins for scientists I came up with in a previous post on Sciencebase touches on the whole issue of trust. I coined the term self-plagiarism, I was alluding to the growing problem of scientists publishing essentially the same paper in two or more journals. Essentially, self-plagiarism is duplication, it’s a [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Trust A few weeks ago, I posted a question on the business and networking site LinkedIn. It was a deliberately na�ve and heavily loaded question, which I hoped would inspire fellow LinkedIn users to respond in depth, but on reflection I probably committed at least one of the seven deadly sins for scientists. It turned out [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Soft Option for Hard Water Well, after a week of sinning, today’s post is more straightforward science news. First up, a soft test for hard water. Researchers in Spain have developed an inexpensive, reusable, and portable hard water sensor based on a fluorescing strand of DNA that could preclude the need for time-consuming titration and or laboratory-bound atomic absorption spectroscopy [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Sciencebase Seedier Side Anyone would think Sciencebase resided in one of the seedier corners of the internet. Because of all the recent fuss about the new seven deadly sins, I was just checking out the visitor traffic using Google Webmaster Tools and found some quite worrying search queries that bring you, dear readers, to this cybershore. Apparently, 4% of [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Seven Deadly Sins for Scientists Given recent pronouncements from a certain organisation based in Rome, I thought it was time to list the Seven Deadly Sins for Scientists. Science is often referred to as being without morals and behaving unethically. Well, science itself cannot be either immoral nor unethical, it is only humans who can have those characteristics in how [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website French Fries, Wild Mushrooms and Ouzo A mixed bag this week in my Alchemist column on ChemWeb.com this week. First up, news that US$1 million is to be ploughed into biofuels research that could circumvent some of the serious environmental concerns associated with this renewable energy source. In the world of pharmaceuticals we discover that there might be yet another string to [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Shedding Light on Optical Storage A review of the state-of-the-art in optical storage technology from Sony scientists caught my eye while I was data mining journal ToC feeds recently. The demise of the Toshiba HD DVD format and the emergence of Sony’s Blu-Ray as the winner has been this decade’s equivalent of the VHS-Betamax face-off of the 1980s. While many commentators [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Lemon Battery The lemon battery, it’s a perennial kids science favourite and perfect for a rainy Saturday morning (if it’s not raining why aren’t you kids outside playing instead of surfing the InterWebs, huh?) Anyway, with a single lemon, a few bits of wire, a copper penny, and a zinc-galvanized nail you can generate electricity (just over [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Linked In Questions Recently, I did a little blogging experiment on the business networking site LinkedIn (inspired by a post on Copyblogger). I was writing a feature article for Sciencebase about risk and the public perception of trust in science and technology. As an alternative route into the opinions of lots of members of the community, I posted [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Girly Addiction to Video Games My latest science news write-ups on the SpectroscopyNOW portal are now up for grabs. This week, I cover the apparent gender gap when it comes to computer games, how Japanese researchers are using near-infrared light to probe young women’s brains to find out if they can reduce stress and potentially acne with pleasant fragrances, and [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Girly Games My latest science news write-ups on the SpectroscopyNOW portal are now up for grabs. This week, I cover the apparent gender gap when it comes to computer games, how Japanese researchers are using near-infrared light to probe young women’s brains to find out if they can reduce stress and potentially acne with pleasant fragrances, and [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Rubbing Up the Gene Genie Sciencebase is this week proud to play host to the Gene Genie Blog Carnival thanks to an offer from Bertalan “Berci” Mesk� over on the excellent ScienceRoll. For those who don’t already know, a Blog Carnival doesn’t usually involve a lot of be-costumed revellers dancing through the streets to the sound of the samba band, [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website I Am Not What I Eat I usually don’t do online, or any other kind, of survey. But, an ad for the Nutriprofile personal nutritional profiling site in the weekend papers caught my eye. It was the accreditation by various academic bodies that caught my eye. Among them, the Universities of Nottingham, Reading, the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website In What We Trust News headlines almost always deal in data-free absolutes. Take this recent strapline from an item on Australian news site: Drinking two or more colas a day - whether sweetened with sugar or an artificial sweetener - doubles your risk of chronic kidney disease, according to new research. And, at the time of writing, the media [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Beer or Wine? In the good-old days there was no choice, if you were posh you drank wine, if you were not you drank beer. Same goes for the Beatles-Stones debate. The Beatles were the nice clean-living, fun loving beat combo, whereas the Rolling Stones were the scare-your-mom hairies. But, making the choice between beer vs wine, Beatles [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Full Spectrum Science News Musical molecules, bright fibres, polarised brain chemistry, and cholesterol regulation, all feature in my SpectroscopyNOW column this week. Musical molecules - What do Schroedinger’s equation and Schoenberg’s expressionism have in common? Not a lot you might think. However, researchers in Germany and the US have now modelled the hydrogen molecule, the archetypal subject of molecular modelling, [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Technological To-Do List A panel of eighteen apparently maverick thinkers was charged with coming up with a to-do list for the twenty-first century by the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE). The maverick panel includes such notables as former director of the National Institutes of Health Bernadine Healy, Google co-founder Larry Page, geneticist and businessman Craig Venter, Nobel [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website CO2 Refusenik to Win Pulitzer Polar bears are not quite the enormous white climate canary of frozen climes that we have been led to believe. In fact, they’re more likely to turn out to be the elephant in the room, when in fifty years time their numbers have grown despite Gory warnings. Anyway, in the spirit of being contrary almost for [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Watery Typo Leads to Salvation In the realm of physical chemistry (or is it chemical physics?) there was almost theological interest in this week’s Alchemist. Having written about water glass and how low-temperature studies of aqueous phase changes are helping scientists to explain this anomalous and yet ubiquitous material it was a simple spellcheck-induced typo that drew the most interest [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Search and Cite for Science Bloggers A couple of weeks ago I was reading a post by Will Griffiths on the ChemSpider Open Chemistry Web blog about how the DOI citation system of journal article lookups might be improved. The DOI system basically assigns each research paper a unique number depending, with an embedded publisher tag. Enter a DOI into a [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Sciencebase Upgraded I finally upgraded the Sciencebase site to the very latest version of Wordpress, it had been languishing at version 2.1.3 (can you believe it?) for far too long. There had not only been dozens of security upgrades since that version and the current version 2.3.3 but various new features that the site was not making [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Giving the Ghetto Blaster Retro Chic The ongoing quest for bigger, better, smaller, faster gadgets and other consumer products is not environmentally sustainable and must be replaced by an approach to design that builds on the products of contemporary mass-produced culture by re-working them for current desires. That is the simple message offered by Stuart Walker of the Faculty of Environmental [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Did Your Doctor Inhale? A survey of medical students in Brazil found that more than 80% use alcohol, while cannabis use is limited to about one in four, a quarter use solvents and just over 25% use tobacco. In contrast, less than three quarters of female medical students use alcohol, just under 15% use tobacco, about 10 percent use [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Who Do You Work For? Getting the balance right between work and life is difficult, if not impossible, for many people. There are so many pressures on us pushing and pulling from countless directions. Multitasking has become the norm, but the act of juggling career, family, and social life and keeping all aspects circling through the air, never dropping anything, [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Six Degees of Separation In the latter part of my university career I met someone from another part of the country who had taken an entirely different degree course at roughly the same time as me, but whom I’d never bumped into at university itself. In fact, it wasn’t until we both ended up working in a small town [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Brain Scan Reveals Cultural Differences I’ve just finished writing a news article for the SpectroscopyNOW.com MRI ezine and wanted to expand on some of the implications of the work here. The item describes the results of recent research that purportedly show differences in how born-and-bred Americans differed from immigrant East Asians tackling a simple visual test based on displayed sequences [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website No Spies Under My Bed Currently, the only truly effective way consumers can stop the collection of their personal data when shopping is not to use the internet, to be paid and to pay for everything in cash, and to hide their money in their mattress. More seriously, most of us will continue to use web services despite privacy concerns. You [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Most Commented Posts on Sciencebase If you have ever wondered what gets people chatting on the Sciencebase Blog and why the site has now passed the 3000 newsfeed subscriber point, then you might like to check out this selection of recent posts that, according to a neat little Wordpress plugin are the posts with the most comments. Actually Alex King’s [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Spammatical Errors I usually ignore the comment spam folders on this website as per my own advice. Occasionally, however, I will scan them quickly. I do so if a regular reader has commented and has emailed to say that their comment is yet to appear. Legitimate words do sometimes get caught in the Akismet netting. I can [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 18 Handpicked Online Periodic Tables Where online do you turn, when you are looking for a periodic table? The domain name PeriodicTable.com - reveals a superb online periodic table with an obvious website name and the option to buy a poster printout. For more on what Periodic Tables mean and their underlying formulations check out Periodic Table Formulations by Mark Leach Berkeley nuclear [...]Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Attractive Health Measures or Magnetic Manure We probably all know at least one person who swears by their magnetic charm bracelet for preventing travel sickness, reducing arthritic pain or even helping them through situations that induce an attack of social anxiety disorder. These bracelets and other devices (some are in the form of headbands, others pendants, blankets, knee braces, shoe inserts, [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Attractive Health Measures or Magnetic Manure", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/attract ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nano Pico Femto Satellites Swarms of satellites each weighing less than 100 grams and not much bigger than a personal digital assistant or even a cell phone could soon be heading for space. These so-called femto satellites could quickly displace the behemoths of yesteryear that weigh in at up to a tonne and may revolutionize applications in telecommunications, military, [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Nano Pico Femto Satellites ", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/nano-pico-femto-satellites.html" } ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 40320, Such a Significant Figure I am currently writing a post about pico and femto satellites for Sciencebase, these devices are tiny compared to the enormous one tonne behemoths many of us would picture if asked to visualise an artificial satellite (more on that later). Anyway, the earth’s escape velocity at sea level from a standing start was a figure [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "40320, Such a Significant Figure", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/40320-such-a-significant-figure.html" }); Cli ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Plasticine, Salt, and Melting Snow Why do they grit the roads with rock salt in winter? What does the salt do to the water to reduce ice on the roads? Is this somehow related to how salt affects the boiling point of water? Keywords to search for: colligative properties, boiling, freezing, ions, solutions, solvent, Raoult’s law Meanwhile, I’ll let Plasticine models [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Plasticine, Salt, and Melting Snow", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/plasticine-salt-and-melting-s ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website An Amply Adequate Sufficiency of Tautology As Russ Swan of Laboratory Talk pointed out in reference to my previous post on the redundancy of the phrase “male semen”, there are numerous other examples around. For instance, the phrase HIV virus is equally redundant as it literally says, “human immunodeficiency virus virus”, likewise ATM machine (automated teller machine machine), PIN number (personal [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "An Amply Adequate Sufficiency of Tautology", url: "http://www.sciencebase ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Airborne Germs and Handwringing Just before the Christmas break, right as my annual winter festival cold kicked in and I was up to my neck in end of year deadlines, I posted a link to a press release in my Geeky Bits science extra column. That page is a repository of the less worthy, but hopefully interesting stuff I [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Airborne Germs and Handwringing", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/airborne-germs-and-handwringing.html" }); Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Learn to Let Go of Your Spam Folders In the spirit of recent posts about conversational spam and other such topics, I thought I’d let you into a little secret. My blog comment spam folder fills up every day but thanks to Akismet you never get to see the spam on the blog itself. Same goes for my GMail account spam folder (I [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Learn to Let Go of Your Spam Folders", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/learn-to-let-go-of-your-spam-folders.html" }); Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Chemical Language Translated During my time at the Royal Society of Chemistry (do I sometimes make it sound like a prison sentence?), I watched in awe as my old mucker Andrew Wilkinson helped reformulate the IUPAC book of chemical definitions commonly known as the Gold Book. That mighty auric tome is online and searchable with a click these [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Chemical Language Translated", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/chemical-language-translated.html" }); Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Billion Light Years from Home Have you ever come across this kind of description of an astronomical event? “…astronomers have witnessed a supermassive black hole blasting its galactic neighbor with a deadly beam of energy…Both galaxies are situated about 1.4 billion light-years away from Earth…The offending galaxy probably began assaulting its companion about 1 million years ago…” How can that be, asks [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "A Billion Light Years from Home", url: "http ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Popular Science Discoveries This Year No science blog would be fulfilling its annual duties if it didn’t provide an end of year round up of what’s been hot and what’s been not in the past year. So, I activated Alex King’s excellent Popularity Contest plugin (new version out now) to find out what Sciencebase readers have been reading the most [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Popular Science Discoveries This Year", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/popular-science-in-2007.html" }); Click ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Science Blogs, Favourites of 2007 In an effort to keep Sciencebase bubbling along during the holiday season, I figured a quickie post listing some of my favourite science blogs from this year might be interesting. Blogs come and go, of course, and my newsreader account is in constant flux with new blogs that catch my attention briefly getting pole [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Science Blogs, Favourites of 2007", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/best-science-blogs.html" }); Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Chemistry�s Sun Rises in the East Many of you will know chemist Andrew Sun from his On the Road blog and from his occasional but insightful comments on the Sciencebase site. I recently interviewed him for the Reactive Reports chemistry webzine and you can read the result there in the current issue. I edited his answers to fit the magazine for [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Chemistry's Sun Rises in the East", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/chemistrys-sun-rises-in-the-east.html" }); Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How to Poison Your Dog this Christmas ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse Well, that may not be quite true, do you know what you’re dog is doing right now? What about the cat? They’re not rummaging through the presents under the tree are they? You didn’t leave any luxury plain [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "How to Poison Your Dog this Christmas", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/how-to-poison-your-dog-this-christm ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website December Chemical Discoveries In addition to my interview with Chinese chemist Andrew Sun, mentioned earlier this week, the December issue of Reactive Reports features the pick of chemistry news  DNA Nanorings  A simple approach to making rigid DNA nanorings with tailor-made functionality has been developed by Michael Famulok and his team at the University of Bonn, Germany. Sunshine Superpower  [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "December Chemical Discoveries", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ten Computing Tips Seeing as the holiday season is fast approaching, I thought I’d offer an extra post covering some of the browsing and blogging tips and tricks I run on the Significant Figures site at Sciencetext.com. On that site I used to mainly discuss inappropriate unit conversions, sloppy statistical use, and dodgy typos in the media and [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Ten Computing Tips", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/top-ten-computing-tips.html" }); Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Composting Chitosan Cat-litter Composite That has to be the oddest blog headline I’ve come up with this week, but it’s not in fact that esoteric once you get down to it. Basically, researchers in China have created a new material based on dolomite (porous kitty litter material) and the crab shell derivative chitosan. The new composite material not only absorbs [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Composting Chitosan Cat-litter Composite ", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/composting-chitosan-cat-litter- ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Male Semen is Redundant You’ve seen the kind of thing: “Warehouse Razed to the Ground in Fire”, as if razing didn’t already mean the building was levelled. Worse, “Balloon Ascends Up into the Air”, ascending down is very difficult, simultaneously, at the same time, if not impossible; so too is descending up. However, the award for the most redundantly tautological [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Male Semen is Redundant", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/male- ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website David Bradley Abbreviated I wrote a rather vainglorious post on my Significant Figures site last week - entitled David Bradley: Killer, Lover, Player Puller, it was basically an excuse to do a bit of personal branding but also highlighted the fact that there are so many other David Bradleys out there, including dozens of professors, photographers, a porn [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "David Bradley Abbreviated", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/david-bradley-abbreviated.html" }); Click here to p ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Could Warm Feet Save the World? Wind turbines, photovoltaic power cells, wave energy, porous hydrogen storage composites for fuel cells, carbon sequestration, nuclear, even the idea of damming the Red Sea for a massive hydroelectric power plant are among the high-tech approaches being developed in the battle to reduce our collective size 9 carbon footprints to mere tiptoes. Saving energy and reducing [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Could Warm Feet Save the World?", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/coul ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Volcanoes, Moons, Pearls, and Alchemy This month’s physical sciences Spotlight over on the Intute site turns on oceanic plans, lunar volcanoes, and pearl necklaces: Infertile Global Warming Plan - Plans to fertilize the oceans with iron or other nutrients in order to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide and so ward off global warming are not viable according to a report from researchers [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Volcanoes, Moons, Pearls, and Alchemy", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/volcanoes-moons ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Sciencebase Top Ten Molecules of 2007 Everyone loves a list. (Don’t they?) Well, as we’re approaching the end of the year and some of us are well into the panto and party season already, I thought it would be a good idea to run down a hit parade of this year’s molecules. So, here’s the Sciencebase Top Ten Molecules of 2007: 10 [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Sciencebase Top Ten Molecules of 2007", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/sciencebase-top-ten-molecules-of-2007.html" }); Click ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Youtube for Scientists Regular readers will know that I have a penchant for posting science videos every now and then. I’ve written about vids on how to explain Newton’s laws with Lego, A spoof sweet potato battery to power your mp3 player, Einstein meets Hendrix, and desktop hockey with one of the most water-repellent materials [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Youtube for Scientists", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/youtube-for-scientists.html" }); Click here to play Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 8 Ways to Get More Juice from Your iPhone Battery If you’ve just bought an iPhone, you’re probably expecting many happy years of battery power. Well, not so fast. Laptop batteries are very similar to rechargeable batteries in other devices, they wear out. I’ve had my current laptop for about 18 months and in the last few weeks I’ve noticed that I’m not getting quite [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "8 Ways to Get More Juice from Your iPhone Battery", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/8-ways-to ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 8 Squeezes for Your iPhone Battery If you’ve just bought an iPhone, you’re probably expecting many happy years of battery power. Well, not so fast. Laptop batteries are very similar to rechargeable batteries in other devices, they wear out. I’ve had my current laptop for about 18 months and in the last few weeks I’ve noticed that I’m not getting quite [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "8 Squeezes for Your iPhone Battery", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/8-ways-to-get-more-juice ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Fourteen Do�s and Don�ts for Medical Bloggers Fellow freelance journalist James Butcher alerted me to the existence of a clutch of rather verbose guidelines for journalists and others pertaining to the reporting of medical research results. The guidelines were published in November by the UK’s Academy of Medical Sciences, an organisation that apparently promotes advances in medical science and campaigns to ensure these [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Fourteen Do's and Don'ts for Medical Bloggers", url: "http://www.scienceb ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Magnolia Gum, Organic Uranium, Biotech Sweetener I’ve got a weird and wonderful mix of chemistry news again on the Reactive Reports site and my Alchemist column on ChemWeb.com Barking Up the Right Tree for Fresh Breath - A traditional Chinese extract from the bark of the magnolia tree could give you fresh breath and kill off the oral microbes that cause halitosis. Cats [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Magnolia Gum, Organic Uranium, Biotech Sweetener", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/magnolia-gum-organic-uranium-b ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Sweet Proteins, Crystallised Proteins A new naturally derived artificial sweetener could soon hit the market, thanks to the development of a mass production technique devised by University of Wisconsin-Madison research Fariba Assadi-Porter. The sweetener, known as brazzein, is a 54 amino acid protein derived from an extract of the fruit of the tropical plant Pentadiplandra brazzeana Baillon. It has [...] SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Sweet Proteins, Crystallised Proteins", url: "http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/sweet- ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download |