ARE YOU A WIZARD!?!??

Today in class we witnessed a demonstration about a class of reactions known as "clock reactions" for the beginning of the chapter on Reaction Kinetics. Dr. Vincent's demonstration, a modified version of the Belousov-Zhabotinskii (BZ) Reaction, mixed different clear reagents together and, after an incubation period the reaction turns a different color!
BUT WAIT!!!

IT TURNS CLEAR AGAIN! WTF MATE!?!?!? WAIT ITS CHANGING AGAIN! What is this sorcery??? Is Dr. Vincent a wizard?
Photo via Funnyjunk.com

Actually, what happens here is a series of cyclic reactions where one of the starting reagents is regenerated in situ (during the course of the reaction) and so the kinetics of the reaction moves back and forth from one side of the equilibrium to the other side- orange, clear, orange, clear, orange...etc. until the reaction has been used up. The regularity of the color switches led to the class of reactions being called "clock reactions."
The BZ reaction (shown in a trippy video here) shows what happens in the solution where the colors are changing in a pattern according to the distribution of molecules in the reaction. This differs slightly from the demo done in a stirred vessel in class- but it's still pretty cool and you get to see pretty colors.
The Wikipedia article on the BZ shows a plot of the electrochemical voltage (where the reaction is) with respect to time, and you can clearly see the repeating cyclic pattern in the center of the graph- although clearly this also goes away after a time. 

There are several other named cyclic reactions, all based on the similar idea of this repeating chemical reaction in time. Youtube videos abound if you're interested in watching pretty shifting colors.

And while we're talking about kinetics, a demo that the graduate students in our department like to perform called "Elephant Toothpaste" (Roll Tide) can be watched below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnB-uU3w6g8

+Joseph Meany

Yeast that I used to Grow

http://n.pr/VlEoJY "Some Budding Yeast that I used to Grow" a Gotye cover.

The original article can be found at http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/01/28/170457572/my-yeast-let-me-down-a-love-song

+Joseph Meany

Future Memory...in your DNA??? How can this affect my wallet?

Researcher Nick Goldman of the Eurpoean Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and his group have expanded the ability of DNA to store information long-term from its previous capacity of 700 terabits per gram (still a lot of information) to 2.2 petabits per gram, which is a threefold increase in storage tech. Comapred to more traditional methods of storage available today, this would equal "Half a Million DVDs Stored in a Gram of DNA" to quote the title of a Wired magazine article.

(Photo credit: Ars Techinica and Goldman, et al. Nature. published online here) 
Ars Technica also reports on this finding published in Nature the other day, on the 23rd of Jan 2013. The figure above gives a brief summary on how the authors were able to encode data like textbook pdf's, Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech in mp3, and picture jpegs.

Note though that this kind of information storage would be inefficient to use for data storage like we use in our computers- read/write material would be too tough for DNA to be able to handle. This kind of memory storage would be best suited for use in data archiving, storage of data that won't ever change but may need to be accessed for a long amount of time.

Science Friday's Ira Glass has released a podcast about this phenomenon, so click through the link to check out the audio podcast. The original articles are below, so go take a look to check out the layman's summary of this cool new tech!
In a related note, Neil deGrasse Tyson spoke before congress the other day talking about the importance of funding for fundamental science research and how results that are interesting today still take a while to reach the consumer- but the investment long term is still worth it!

From the article:
"Tyson cited Michael Faraday discovering the basic principles behind generating electricity in the 1830s (with a quote that is apocryphal at best), then noted "We didn't electrify cities until the turn of the century." Quantum physics was born in the 1920s, and it took another 50 years for those principles to see widespread commercial applications in computing: "A third of the world economy is based on quantum physics, because information technology requires quantum physics!""

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/01/dna-data-storage-2/
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/mp3-files-written-as-dna-with-storage-density-of-2-2-petabytes-per-gram/
http://sciencefriday.com/segment/01/25/2013/shakespeare-s-sonnets-encoded-in-dna.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11875.html
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/neil-degrasse-tyson-takes-his-case-for-science-funding-to-dc/

Hot Ice

Part of the discussion in class today involved a section on supersaturated solutions. An excellent example that you can work with on your own time at home is the "Hot Ice" demo, also used in the manufacture of reusable chemical heating pads- like the ones you would stick in your gloves while going out skiing and sledding!

Since the process of crystallization is exothermic, when the crystals form in the hot pads they release heat which your hands feel for the time that it takes the solid to form. To regenerate the supersaturated solution, all you need to do is boil the heat pack (endothermic process!) and you can cause the recrystallization whenever you need that little burst of heat. 

I'm sure many of my friends in New England are thinking these might be useful these days, as the weather is so cold!

In the name of SCIENCE!!! I have a few demo's to pass along if you'd like to experiment with the idea of the hot ice yourself. DISCLAIMER: While the science in these syntheses is sound, I have not tried these exact procedures myself and assume no responsibility for the exact nature of the directions I will include herein. Always use your best judgement when working with chemicals and wear proper safety gear- this may just be foodstuffs but you never know when something might go wrong!

(from http://www.instructables.com/id/Crystallization-of-homemade-sodium-acetate/)

This first procedure details the formation of a crude sodium acetate, mostly for playing around with but notes that this impure product will not act correctly under the supersaturated conditions because of the impurities still present. However, a link provided in the first procedure includes a more complete procedure to purify the crude product, allowing you to crystallize the sodium acetate and work with this circular process. So next time it's a chilly night out and you want to warm up your hand with a fun show, try out this process!

http://www.instructables.com/id/Crystallization-of-homemade-sodium-acetate/

http://www.instructables.com/id/Sodium-Acetate/

+Joseph Meany 

I love how cautious medical advice comes AFTER a long description on some sort of miracle breakthrough. Take for example this recent news bit about Viagra helping to reduce fat in mice. They include the required little disclaimer that this has only been tried on mice and not on humans...but the title still gives hope to people that a cure may be in sight.


"Caution against premature application
Despite promising data, researchers caution the public against the fallacy of thinking that popping some sildenafil will work to quickly lose the extra pounds accumulated over the holidays. "We are currently in the basic research stage, and all the studies have been exclusively performed on mice," stresses Prof. Pfeifer. It will be a long way until potentially suitable drugs for decreasing white fat cells in humans will be found."

Machine translated from the original source:
"Presumably, the drug also reduces the risk of complications of obesity."

This is an interesting step for medical science, and another interesting side-effect of this hypertension treatment drug.

The full story can be found here, and the original press release can be found over here. The correct browser settings can translate the page into English.

http://www3.uni-bonn.de/Pressemitteilungen/008-2013

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130117105738.htm

I'll have to look at this idea behind the different color fat cells too, I don't have any experience with what they are. I guess they don't teach that in Biology classes yet!

+Joseph Meany

"For whatever reason, the White House has not yet responded to a petition demanding "free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research"—even though the petition is 10 months old and has more than 56,000 signatures."

-From Ars Technica

The White House has increased its petition threshold for a response from 25,000 signatures to 100,000. This has the effect of decreasing the number of petitions the administration would need to respond to, including that of the petition to construct a Death Star or the several petitions for southern states to secede from the union. One petition that caught my eye in this blurb though, is a petition that is discussed above. 

The full text of the original petition, found at whitehouse.gov, states 

"We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.

The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research."

The abstract to the public policy webpage outlines the law:

"The NIH Public Access Policy implements Division G, Title II,  Section 218 of PL 110-161 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008).  The law states:

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law."

Though this law would ideally foster greater collaboration and public access to cutting edge research, problems of safety risks and copyright infringement must surely be weighed. I'm no copyright lawyer, and so generation of a dialogue between publishers, the public, and law makers needs to open up.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-free-access-over-internet-scientific-journal-articles-arising-taxpayer-funded-research/wDX82FLQ

http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/100k-signatures-now-needed-before-white-house-comments-on-death-star-plans/

+Joseph Meany 

A "Universal Truth" that we were all told about in school has been overturned, and this is a very non-intuitive change. But I guess that's just how quantum physics works anyhow. Scientists have recently observed a phenomenon not easily resolved with our collective common experience. "Absolute Zero"- the temperature at which particle motion was supposed to stop- may not be so absolute after all.
A report published in Science shows that potassium atoms in a solid state, when cooled by lasers and magnets, have the ability to switch into a "negative" temperature on the absolute scale. An article in Wired gives a good mouth-wetter into the material presented, but two other reports by NPR and Nature  give more full explanations on what is going on. I'll save the gritty details for the link, but it effectively involves a matter of "inversion" within the distribution of energetic states of the atoms that makes the cold atoms really hot.
The NPR podcast ScienceFriday interviewed Vladan Vuletic, a physicist at MIT to help explain what this all really means. The Nature article help expand the narrative how this came about, and gives some possible applications of this new finding to science in general (spoiler alert- antigravity is invoked). Give a listen, and let me know what you think!

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/01/below-absolute-zero/
http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-gas-goes-below-absolute-zero-1.12146
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6115/52
http://sciencefriday.com/topics/physics-chemistry/segment/01/04/2013/negative-temperatures-that-are-hotter-than-the-sun.html

+Joseph Meany

Harvard scientists have won the President's Challenge award as well as $70,000 in startup funds for a business to help develop stabilizing technology for routine vaccines that are meant for developing countries. From the press release:

“We thought about how to use silk for tackling the most unmet challenges in global health,” said Livio Valenti, a Harvard Kennedy School student. “We saw the opportunity to build a sustainable, profitable business while creating an important public good: increasing access to health for those who are most in need.”

This breakthrough will be important for future developments in drug delivery over all areas, not just for the developing countries. This will be particularly important for vaccine storage in the case of a national or natural  emergency problem (zombie apocalypse anyone?) for when vaccine production will be greatly reduced or nonexistent.
The original press release can be found at
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/06/harvard-entrepreneurs-weave-silk-with-science/

+Joseph Meany

A "Letter" To young scientists

To start off the New Year, I thought I would post an inspirational TED video that I was able to listen to while travelling back to AL from my Christmas break in NH.

E.O. Wilson, a retired professor of Biology at Harvard and an alumnus of UA spoke at TEDMED in April 2012 addressing a letter to young scientists and people considering scientific careers. The full video can be watched here, and towards the end he outlines five "principles" to succeed in science today. In brief, they are:

1. Breadth is as important as depth. Study widely.

2.March away from the guns.

3.There's an ideal organism to study for every interesting problem.

4.Step away from the blackboard.

5.If you need math, help will come.

An article from The Atlantic types out a partial transcript of Dr. Wilson's talk and provides his extra discussion about each of those principles. It is an encouraging discourse expounding how to find one's niche within science- especially when it comes to the learning and utility of mathematics to prepare for said career. Check out the article, and absolutely give the video a close listen!

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/eo-wilsons-five-principles-for-budding-scientists/255804/

http://www.ted.com/talks/e_o_wilson_advice_to_young_scientists.html

+Joseph Meany