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

Telling stories in science, while being true.

In this lengthy Science Friday discussion about science and its portrayal to the greater general public, Ira Flatow sits down with cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist Brian Greene, and author Ian McEwan to talk about "how to spin a yarn about string theory or the Big Bang without hyping or distorting the science."
The reactions on Twitter to the story are interesting, such as @QuantumCowboy's tweet saying "@scifri Among the greatest scientist-storytellers: Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan. #scifrichat"
The link to the story is here.

One of the things that perennially swims through my mind is, "Why are there so many 'celebrity' physicists, cosmologists, and biologists but no 'celebrity' chemists?" What is it about our field that doesn't lend itself to the level of publicity and media wonder that astronomy gets? Why do people even bother listening to ideas on string theory that really doesn't do justice to how complex the field really is? Granted, Astronomy and Biology offer some stunning pictures- but what about the possibilities offered by the other sciences? Speaking of Carl Sagan and his career in cosmology, I highly recommend his series "Cosmos" that was released in the 70's but has just as much illustrative power now as it did then. You can find it on Netflix.
In case you haven't seen it, this all reminds me of a great film I saw back in High School that helped teach (and remind) me about the powers of ten and its power. Morgan Freeman narrates
"Cosmic Voyage". You can find "Cosmic Voyage"  here. It's about a half-hour long.

Maybe we just need to be better storytellers. We don't have to invoke hyper-symmetry like string theory, nor work with ideas uncommon to every-day life and yet we barely get beyond a few segments in Bill Nye.

UPDATE: 4pm Tuesday, Apr 2;
Part of the way through the ScienceFriday podcast one of the guests confirms my suspicion that chemistry has been underrepresented in the public view of science. It's waiting for its "Shakespeare or Mozart" to really shine.

+Joseph Meany

Shampoo -No 'poo!

Deriving from the discussion in class today talking about "pH Buffered" Shampoos and their possibilities for existing, I thought I might take a little exploration into shampoo as it exists because really, have we spent any time at all thinking about this thing that plays such a present role in our daily lives?

Seriously guys, it's for research sake.

It turns out that early shampoos were really basic (alkaline and rudimentary both!) solutions of ash and water that people would use to strip hair of dirt and grime, but this left hair really dry so natural oils were used to reintroduce moisture to hair.
So what's this all got to do with pH buffering? Well Dr. Vincent posited that it was a marketing ploy to sell more product- and while it very well may be, I think I'll follow a different line of thought. Wikipedia includes a handy little quip that buffers in shampoos are slightly acidic to counteract the basicity of soaps. This would make sense for people with long hair, who have a higher chance of getting soap from their body into their hair which would damage it.

The "No Poo" movement caught my eye while poking around the internet, and it made for an entertaining read at the start. If you don't know what it is, look it up. Just be careful of your search terms haha!

+Joseph Meany

Deserts, and the overturning of conventional "wisdom."

Sometimes there are problems that we cannot seem to fix with conventional "wisdom." The climate is an incredibly complex system whose balance is a current topic of great controversy (search climate change", and you'll get an interesting cornucopia of results), but the transformation of arable land into desert is a problem that is undeniably serious. We rely on the land to exist- to grow food and to inhabit in general.
Allan savory, a speaker at TED presents his research in this inspiring talk about his discovery about the ecology of land arability and logistics planning.

Personally, I hope this message reaches a great many people. In the areas worst affected by the drying of their lands, this can mean the difference between life and death.

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


+Joseph Meany