Awesome Nicknames

So I'm reading J. R. Partington's "A Short History of Chemistry" (Harper Torchbooks, 1965) partly because it's an old book that I saved from destruction by a local library and partly because no chemistry course I've ever taken really touches on the development of the science that is so central to my life. I know it's dated and there are probably a lot of other texts that are more modern or may be more comprehensive- but I got it for a bargain. Get off my back alright? Okay. Thanks.

I'm working my way through the section right now that's basically discussing the high-times of alchemical study (which interestingly enough coincide with the European Middle Ages) and I've found that many of those researchers had names attributed to them, some based on scholastic significance while others have no evident origin and others just gave it to them[1]. Paracelsus, known also by his real name Theophrastus Bombast von Hoenheim, fits this latter description.

Theophrastus Bombast von Hoenheim...and his brother, Bombad Boss Nass von Hoenheim

Robert Bacon, and many of the other Franciscan Monks earned the scholarly titles, for example Bacon's Doctor Mirablis or Thomas Aquinas' Doctor Angelicus. Albert the Great, Albertus Magnus, was given his nickname by his peers during his lifetime because he brought to public attention many of the philosophical works which had become esoteric at that time.
From that, my question is- why can't we have cool nicknames again? I know it would complicate authorship attribution (which was rife in the Middle Ages), but how awesome would it be to be known as something other than your direct name? I guess that's what Twitter handles are for- I'm looking at you @SeeArrOh! But really. Can't we get a bit of grandiosity generated here? I mean something to really shed light on the SHEER AWESOME of the work that we do? Maybe something just  little bit more varied than Philosophiae Doctor!

What name might you choose, or what name do you think others might ascribe to you? Myself? I would choose Molectronicus.
+Joseph Meany

[1] http://www.naturasophia.com/Paracelsus.html Accessed 6 Aug 2013

Investing Your Humanity

"There's something about investing your humanity, your eccentricity, your exuberance in the things you do. Why do people watch tightrope walkers? Not to see them get to the other side. Its because they might fall. Not everything you do is going to be successful, but that's part of the allure. It's also what makes the work valuable: that you're really present and invested in what you're doing."- Louis Rossetto, Wired Editor and cofounder.

Last month, Wired Magazine celebrated its first twenty years with a special edition of the magazine. Rossetto closed the article with the above quote and it really struck a chord with me, not because I want to start a magazine but because I understand his passion. Originally I started this blog as a part of a fellowship requirement. But since completing that project, this has taken on a life of its own. I never knew that a somewhat mature ecosystem of different chemistry blogs existed, not just as a part of the major publishers but coming from research groups, PhD students and interested hobbyists alike.
I got onto Twitter for the same reason. and in addition to using it to keep up with the latest literature, @CrimsonAlkemist has become a vehicle to interact with other professionals on a social level- presenting cool quirky things and sometimes lamenting about #phdlife. The cool thing about all this is that in addition to creating a non-traditional networking system, I have been able to create something on my own to be proud of. Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter said once in an interview,

"By simply announcing himself as a genius on his business card, Wile E. Coyote epitomized the spirit of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. When you're starting a company, you sometimes have nothing more than an idea. You have to begin somewhere so you declare yourself an entrepreneur just like Wile E. declared himself a genius. then you make a business card and give yourself the title 'Founder and CEO'."
Biz went on to create Genius Labs (which was later acquired by Google), and then Twitter.

I find that science isn't so different. We, as inquisitive minds, invest a little part of ourselves in each question we ask and are fulfilled by each question we answer. Experiments and observations, hypotheses and data. Even the failure of a reaction is an act of creation- albeit a minor one. To continue asking different questions until you find the right one is no short act of will. It's valuable. To me, that's what makes my work in the lab and on this blog alluring.

So to my readers I ask, how did you find your passion? How did you come to blogging about chemistry, about science? What about Twitter's ecosystem keeps you hunting down little tidbits of information to share with people you may or may not have met (yet)?

+Joseph Meany

Science and open policy

People complain about how science needs to be more open. I just realized I'm thankful for how open science is today, especially compared with the days of early science and alchemy where findings were encoded in such a form that only those specifically trained were able to unravel their meaning. Since science has progressed to a more standardized form, however, this leaves researchers of historical texts with a large job of decoding the past. With so much information available online, it is important that we are able to communicate thoroughly and openly- but most importantly- truthfully.


"This has always been a problem, however, because the texts that [the alchemists] have left us are very secretive. They're often very metaphorical they're often in a kind of code; and they're filled with all sorts of extravagant imagery- often very beautiful wood cuts but forbidding in the sense of...what does it all mean?"

This comes from Professor Larry Principe of Johns Hopkins University. He works as a science historian trying to decode many of the historical alchemy texts and the American Chemical Society recently put out a video overviewing some of his work. He explains that his main hurdles are decoding these metaphors and symbols, to repeat reactions done by "the ancients" using their methods and glassware to see what it is they actually made.

J.R. Partington, in his book, "A Short History of Chemisty" outlines that many texts from ~1200-1500 are "largely unintelligible" alluding to the secretive nature of this pseudoscience during the time, a contrasting discussion to his earlier elaboration on the treatises written by the Ancient Greeks, Arabs, and Egyptians. Shamefully, as well, "the later history of alchemy is often that of fraud."


While peer review is not perfect in its mission to vet what is "good science" and "bad science," I firmly support the system in place today opposing the search for the philosopher's stone of yesteryear. In the discussion of how to improve science communication we need to not forget- some control is better than none.

http://gizmodo.com/meet-the-man-who-decodes-the-ancient-secrets-of-alchemy-633187520

 http://fc02.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2013/111/7/c/alchemy_woodcut_duos_caputis_melior_quam_unus_est_by_dashinvaine-d62i1y6.jpg

Makes the body shudder.

So recently, I made the conscious decision that I was going to drink less soda while at work. Mostly, it was because I just wanted to cut down on sugar and caffeine, but I just absolutely loved the mouthfeel of carbonated drinks. So I switched to naturally flavored tonic waters, like lemon and lime. It's been a good transition so far and I'm actually cutting back on consumption of those too. Next time I go shopping, I'll find something else to put in the refrigerator at work. This has an added bonus, and I'll tell you why.

We all hear about how bad soda is for us. "It's full of sugar and makes you fat!" "You'll rot your teeth!" "Dahhbetus (in your best Wilfred Brimley impression)" and a slew of other info from places like Quittingsoda.com. The sugar intake was what made me originally want to slough off sodas, and to be honest I could never get over the taste of artificial sweeteners. The word "chloro-sugar" makes my spine shiver. But today I saw a tweet that led me to a paper released in Langmuir in April on how fluoride ions in drinking water led to a decrease of bacterial adhesion on the surface of teeth. The authors note, however, that the prevailing wisdom of the times suggested that the fluoride ions integrated into the tooth enamel itself, strengthening it against mineral erosion was incorrect. The authors write,
"The cariostatic impact of fluoride treatment is often traced back to a decreased demineralization of the teeth: in comparison to hydroxyapatitie (HAP), fluoroapatite (FAP) exhibits a higher resistance to acids, leading to a lower demineralization (demineralization of HAP and FAP starts at pH 5.5 and 4.6, respectively)."
This means that the FAP is a better protection against acid attack than is HAP. They also note later in the article that original estimates on how thick the FAP layer forms was off by about 100times, 10nm as opposed to 1000nm. This thickness change made scientists question exactly what was going on. The conclusion of the paper states,
"AFM with bacterial probes revealed that fluoride treatment of HAP substrates reduces the adhesion of [tested bacteria] by a factor of two."

Let's look back at the pH dependency of the demineralization in acid. 5.5 and 4.6. That's all well and good, but what is the pH of a regular soda? QuittingSoda has a handy little chart showing that the tested pH of sodas all hang below 4.1- with most being below 3! So with every sip of soda you're actaully washing away the tooth enamel. A shuddering thought to say the least. So I'll save my teeth the trouble, and get on that transition for their sake. After all, I like my smile as it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLDxWH0meJM (DiaBEATus Remix)
http://quittingsoda.com/post/the-acidity-ph-of-soda-pop
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/la4008558

Inspiring curiosity and teaching to learn.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ramsey_musallam_3_rules_to_spark_learning.html

"But if we as educators leave behind this simple role as disseminators of content and embrace a new paradigm as cultivators of curiosity and inquiry, we just might bring a little bit more meaning to their school day, and spark their imagination."

This video is a great watch for anyone considering a career in public education. Musallam pleads the case for teachers to find ways to get students actively engaged with the material they are supposed to be learning- to teach them to ask questions and be curious about the world around them. Asking questions (even tough ones) is the only way to really understand the universe and our place in it.
I'll spare you the diatribe that much of the education in the US has been reduced to little more than rote preparation for standardized tests, there are plenty of those articles out in the internet these days. There are lots of ideas on how to get student's attention (Musallam even mentions a couple in the video), but depending on your area of education they may or may not be generally applicable. Musallam's passion for encouraging his students to ask questions stems from his heart surgery- but curiosity can just as easily produce a journalist, artist, or head chef as a scientist or surgeon.

+Joseph Meany

This story really got my goat.

So last week I briefly discussed the problem of science having a problem being sensationalist in its reporting. I understand the importance of creating hype to generate clicks and pageviews.... otherwise I wouldn't have a blog myself. At least not one worth checking in on. Anyway, I was reading through some of the R&D Mag headlines this morning and came across one that really caught my eye as cool. It was titled "Engineers manipulate a buckyball by inserting a single water molecule."
I thought to myself, "Wow! That's really neat!" I talked to a coworker of mine about the story as well and his first reaction was the same. My second reaction, though, was "How did they get the water molecule inside the buckyball?" I don't know of any experiments that have successfully cracked open a fullerene ball and then put it back together. I was expecting to find in the paper some experimental results that detailed that process in addition to seeing a fullerene ball rolling on a surface in response to an electric field. Instead, when I opened up the primary article I was treated to a discussion of molecular dynamics and density functional theory calculations. I felt like South Park fans when [spoiler alert] Cartman's dad was revealed to be Cartman's mom [end spoiler alert]. The language in the press release article led me to believe that scientists had actually isolated what they called "water@C60". The opening sentence of the press release read:

"Columbia Engineering researchers have developed a technique to isolate a single water molecule inside a buckyball, or C60, and to drive motion of the so-called “big” nonpolar ball through the encapsulated “small” polar H2O molecule, a controlling transport mechanism in a nanochannel under an external electric field."

This means that they supposedly synthesized this complex and actually drove the molecule on the surface. However, the authors of the journal article make no such claim and are quite clear that all of their conclusions were drawn from theoretical calculations- no direct measurements were made. Only one sentence, towards the end of the press release, outlines the fact that the experiments were at all computational through "extensive atomistic simulations." Reading in the original article, however, reveals that water entrapment inside a C60 molecule has been done before, in 2011 and is reported in the journal Science. This goes on to answer my "how" question but still leaves me with a sour taste in my mouth about the terrible choice of language in the press release that came out this morning.

http://www.rdmag.com/news/2013/05/engineers-manipulate-buckyball-inserting-single-water-molecule
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6042/613.full

OUTRAGEOUS CLAIMS!

Science has a problem. A communication problem. At the beginning of this semester I posted about EO Wilson's call to arms for young scientists to become proficient and prolific workers in decoding the universe's mysteries. Later on, I posted a Science Friday post about how scientists face a particular challenge when communicating basic research to the public. Indeed, a recent article from ScienceInsider outlines how a senator wants to further restrict science funding, based on "waste" research.
Being able to communicate results to the public and have them understand importance in a meaningful way is a monumental challenge. The Science Friday post earlier was key to that idea. On the other hand, we must avoid making outrageous claims or overstate possibilities. For example, the little animal called a "water bear" or Tardigrade, can survive being frozen and dehydrated for around 10 years. However, claims first listed this little one to be able to survive such extreme environments for over 100 years! The authors of that first paper were over zealous in their reporting and as the scientists in the 2001 paper report:
"The story about century-long cryptobiotic survival in
tardigrades provides a good example of how some
biological phenomena, especially those related to
extreme life spans, easily give rise to sensational jour-
nalism in popular science. More importantly, the story
shows that incorrect information, if spectacular enough,
may persist for several decades when perpetuated also
by the scientific community."

Watch what you say. It may come back to bite you, and in ways not directly related to your results.  But for more interesting animal "superpowers", check out this WIRED article!


http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2013/04/us-lawmaker-proposes-new-criteri-1.html
http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2F30329_E64E804ABAE44FC6A4062DC2B6ABFA1C_journals__ZOO_ZOO255_01_S0952836901001169a.pdf&cover=Y&code=54cc5d956fe8512c83c2e95bce65491e
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/04/animal-superpowers?pid=6773