TIZER'S SCIENCE NEWS

[Tizer]

It's often the case that the same chemical can have completely different functions in different parts of our body. Scientists in the USA, studying mice, have now found that two proteins involved in the mechanism for tasting food are also a component of the testes and sperm and are essential for fertility. When mice were bred lacking the genes for these two proteins they were unable to taste food and were infertile. The researchers also found that the drug clofibrate blocked production of the proteins and gave the same result - no taste and no fertility. This is a bit worrying because the clofibrate class of drugs are often presribed in humans to treat high blood cholesterol or high blood triglycerides. Similar compounds, the structurally-related phenoxy-herbicides, find widespread use in modern agriculture and are known to block human taste. The researchers speculate that these compounds could be negatively affecting human fertility, an increasing problem worldwide.

Further details here: http://www.monell.org/news/news_release ... _sterility

[Stanley]

Add to that the adverse effects of rogue oestrogen in the environment from the Pill and it's a wonder these young lads today ever manage to have kids! Vera and I decided to have three children at two year intervals and were spot on target. I wonder how much influence to absence of these contaminants had on that! Funnily enough, it has no significance at all for me now.....
News this morning that the RCVS has discovered that Guillemot eggs have a self-cleaning surface. (LINK)

[Bodger]

So global warming is a fact if you believe NASA ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2stHuRMM ... e=youtu.be

[hartley353]

Is this a man made situation, or a natural occurrence that has happened many times before, the only certainty is that the truth is beyond modern knowledge, and out of our control.

[Stanley]

See this LINK for the most expensive burger in the world. The 'meat' was grown in the lab from beef stem cells. Obviously uneconomic now but is this a harbinger of the future? If so, I'm glad I'm getting old and won't live to see it.

[Tizer]

If the `artificial meat' story sounds a bit familiar that's because we've heard it (or a very similar one) before. Rank Hovis McDougall (RHM) developed a meat substitute made from fungal protein (`mycoprotein') starting in the 1960s and it's now known as Quorn and eaten by vegetarians.
http://www.mycoprotein.org/what_is_myco ... story.html

[Stanley]

I've always had a soft spot for Dolphins and was cheered by the news that scientists believe they have a more retentive memory than any other animal. (LINK)

[EileenDavid]

I like dolphin's too. Dave and I used to watch them when we were on the beach in Goa and one day teenagers were on one of those banana things towed behind a speed boat and a girl fell off and was screaming (don't know whether she was frightened or with glee) anyway the dophin's started circling her until she was picked up as though they were protecting her. Eileen

[Stanley]

News that 'Men don't wash their hands enough'..... I can't help thinking about the days when I was steeped in an environment contaminated by faeces with no hand-washing facilities. All right, I was exposed to an enormous load of contamination but I wasn't troubled by it. Question is which came first, the chicken or the egg. What was the effect on my immune system? I wash my hands frequently with soap now I am in an environment where this is easy, especially before cooking but I often wonder about the modern predilection for disinfecting everything ('kills 99.9% of known germs'). Is there a happy mean?

[David Whipp]

Cow muck is probably cleaner than some people's hands...

The benefit of good hand washing routines is to cut down cross infection from one person to another; it's part of the foundations of our preventative health care.

It may be that babies and vulnerable people who survive infections have strengthened systems, but there will be those that don't survive.

[Tizer]

Well said, David. I keep having to repeat how we must the note the difference between `population resistance' and `individual resistance'. The price that we pay to increase population resistance is the death, maiming or illness of a part of the population; for example, if we want to expose our children to infection in the hope of increasing their resistance we must accept that some of them will die. That was OK in past centuries but is no longer acceptable.

Most people don't understand that you're more likely to get influenza, colds or coughs from hand contact than through the air. We used to have all that publicity saying `coughs and sneezes spread diseases' which gave the impression that you had to inhale the viruses and bacteria. Not so, door handles and supermarket trolley handles are examples of where you pick them up. Similarly, food poisoning and norovirus and MRSA etc. We'll be in real trouble if there is ever a very serious outbreak of bird flu in the UK.

[Stanley]

Not sure whether this is exactly on topic but we talked about ash die-back on here I think. It seems there may be a silver lining to the cloud. Reports of very strong demand for British hardwood so perhaps the trees affected will find a ready market. Or does the disease affect the timber?

[Cathy]

All the items you have to remember that can spread germs from person to person. Is the tap clean that you have to turn off, after washing your hands, is the door handle on your exit clean, are there 2 exits as can often happen in a public toilet. Is someone's front door handle clean, what about a pen shared, or a counter top that you might rest your hands on while talking to someone, and the escalater handle? What about money?? Goodness, it won't be long before every (?) home has a hand sanitizer at the ready as soon as you have stepped thru the front door. And as our adverts tell us - the spray from a sneeze can be spread quite a few metres. What to do?

[Stanley]

Cathy, I think you're right. No doubt at all that all these things are sources of contact with bacteria but if we aren't careful we get like Howard Hughes who famously was so afraid of infection he became a paranoid recluse. Perhaps we should do what humans have always done, rely on our immune system but take sensible precautions. I remember having a conversation with John Wilfred Pickard (old Barlick GP) about this and he said the same thing but admitted that on the rare occasions when he used a public toilet he avoided touching the door handles by putting his hand in his jacket pocket. So even a man exposed to infection all the time had his personal quirks.

[Cathy]

Had to cross two sets of traffic lights today, instead of using my 'unprotected finger tips' to press the crossing button I pulled down my cardigan sleeves over my fingers and then pressed the button... Oh dear

[Tardis]

Not sure whether this is exactly on topic but we talked about ash die-back on here I think. It seems there may be a silver lining to the cloud. Reports of very strong demand for British hardwood so perhaps the trees affected will find a ready market. Or does the disease affect the timber?

Sounds like the Forestry Commission is advising the affected wood to be burnt:

http://www.forestry.gov.uk/chalara

[Bruff]

Scientists at the Univesity of Upsalla in Sweden have sythesised the most absorbemt material known, a magnesium carbonate - or upsalite, as it's been called. One gram has a surface area of 800 square metres. Or put another way, it's like getting the surface area of an average home and crumpling it up so that you can pick it up with a pair of tweezers. Possible applications in electronics and so on.

But of equal interest, the discovery was the result of the experiment being left on in error over the weekend. Such is often the way of things. I synthesised a new material due to my leaving the pot on over a weekend. It proved to be of no use at all, save to note that was a new compound never previously made and so in and of itself an addition to the sum of human knowledge and so perhaps the human condition.

Richard Broughton

[Cathy]

Sorry, but... Pardon??

[PanBiker]

Lots of discoveries are accidental or off the back of something else intended, the trick I suppose is being able to recognise the potential. Of the more famous, Penicillin comes to mind and what would we do without that and all the other research into other antibiotic substances ans synthesises that it triggered.

[Tizer]

It's an important discovery so let's have the full press release from the university. The final web link in the story is to the full scientific paper which is available to us all as the journal is open source (like Linux!). (Cathy, it's going to be great stuff for mopping up spilled wine!)

‘Impossible’ material made by Uppsala University researchers
Published 2013-07-18
A novel material with world record breaking surface area and water adsorption abilities has been synthesized by researchers from Uppsala University, Sweden. The results are published today in the journal `PLOS ONE'.

The magnesium carbonate material that has been given the name Upsalite is foreseen to reduce the amount of energy needed to control environmental moisture in the electronics and drug formulation industry as well as in hockey rinks and ware houses. It can also be used for collection of toxic waste, chemicals or oil spill and in drug delivery systems, for odor control and sanitation after fire.
“In contrast to what has been claimed for more than 100 years in the scientific literature, we have found that amorphous magnesium carbonate can be made in a very simple, low-temperature process”, says Johan Goméz de la Torre, researcher at the Nanotechnology and Functional Materials Division.

While ordered forms of magnesium carbonate, both with and without water in the structure, are abundant in nature, water-free disordered forms have been proven extremely difficult to make. In 1908, German researchers claimed that the material could indeed not be made in the same way as other disordered carbonates, by bubbling CO2 through an alcoholic suspension. Subsequent studies in 1926 and 1961 came to the same conclusion. “A Thursday afternoon in 2011, we slightly changed the synthesis parameters of the earlier employed unsuccessful attempts, and by mistake left the material in the reaction chamber over the weekend. Back at work on Monday morning we discovered that a rigid gel had formed and after drying this gel we started to get excited”, says Johan Goméz de la Torre.

A year of detailed materials analysis and fine tuning of the experiment followed. One of the researchers got to take advantage of his Russian language skills since some of the chemistry details necessary for understanding the reaction mechanism was only available in an old Russian PhD thesis. “After having gone through a number of state of the art materials characterization techniques it became clear that we had indeed synthesized the material that previously had been claimed impossible to make”, says Maria Strømme, professor of nanotechnology and head of the nanotechnology and functional materials division.

The most striking discovery was, however, not that they had produced a new material but it was instead the striking properties they found that this novel material possessed. It turned out that Upsalite had the highest surface area measured for an alkali earth metal carbonate; 800 square meters per gram. “This places the new material in the exclusive class of porous, high surface area materials including mesoporous silica, zeolites, metal organic frameworks, and carbon nanotubes”, says Strømme. “In addition we found that the material was filled with empty pores all having a diameter smaller than 10 nano meters. This pore structure gives the material a totally unique way of interacting with the environment leading to a number of properties important for application of the material.”

Upsalite is for example found to absorb more water at low relative humidities than the best materials presently available; the hydroscopic zeolites, a property that can be regenerated with less energy consumption than is used in similar processes today. “This, together with other unique properties of the discovered impossible material is expected to pave the way for new sustainable products in a number of industrial applications”, says Maria Strømme.

The discovery will be commercialized though the University spin-out company Disruptive Materials (http://www.disruptivematerials.com) that has been formed by the researchers together with the holding company of Uppsala University. The article describing the novel material is published in PLOS ONE can be read on the following link: http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0068486

[hartley353]

Reading Cathy's posts makes you think, two members of my family down with noro/vrus type thing probably caught by contact, the most common thing we all touch and pass to others is money. When money was made from silver it had self cleansing properties, it now seems we have gone backwards with our cheap coinage. Bring on plastic notes that could be laundered.

[Tizer]

Likewise, when copper coins were really made of copper they would have had some antibacterial property. Once money all becomes digital we won't get norovirus or influenza from it...but we might get a computer virus instead!

Talking of copper, I listened to a recording of Radio 4's Material World from a couple of months ago and they were discussing the preservation state of the Dornier bomber with a lady who is working on its metal composition. One of the reasons it hadn't disintegrated as much as expected is that the aluminium alloy that it's constructed from doesn't contain copper - unusual for an aeroplane because the copper is usually included to give strength to the alloy. The presence of copper in most aero alloys means that most of the old WW2 aircraft that crashed in the sea corroded fast. As well as less electrolytic corrosion, the absence of copper also allowed living organisms to colonise the airframe and these too have provided protection.

[Stanley]

Fascinating. I knew Dural and similar strong aluminium materials were alloys but I didn't know what with.....

[Bodger]

Save your old chip pan dripping, it could be useful
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/sc400135y

[Stanley]

I use mine to make firelighters for the stove..... Much more simple!