Category Archives: Research

The Man Who Unboiled an Egg

Very cool article on HervÃ© This and the science of cooking: The man who unboiled an egg:

HervÃ© has taught at the universities of Tours and Montpellier, and has his own laboratory at the venerable CollÃ¨ge de France, which, today, is also the base for all four of France’s living Nobel prize winners. One of them, Jean-Marie Lehn, invited HervÃ© to join his department in 1995. In HervÃ©’s laboratory, there is a cupboard full of chemical compounds such as sulphuric acid, sodium carbonate and Mercurochrome, while the shelves are stacked with things you’d normally associate with the kitchen: bottles of balsamic vinegar and olive oil, pots of mustard and cinnamon, bags of salt and shallots, and a bar of chocolate.
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‘I go through ancient recipe books, preferably from the 18th and 19th centuries, jot down what they have to say and test it,’ he says.
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On the morning of our second meeting, HervÃ© measures the pressure inside a chip. He’s aiming to disprove a famous scientific paper which states that oil infiltrates chips during cooking. He heats oil to 168Â°C, measures a chip, hooks it up to a manometer and plunges it in the oil. Unfortunately, the experiment goes wrong and ends up with the chip falling to the bottom of the pan. He is unconcerned. ‘In order to come up with conclusive results, I’ll have to carry it out 100 times.’
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He explains that when an egg is cooked, the protein molecules unroll themselves, link up and enclose the water molecules. In order to ‘uncook’ the egg, you need to detach the protein molecules from each other. By adding a product like sodium borohydride, the egg becomes liquid within three hours.

Very fun read, go read the rest of the article. And try out that uncooking an egg thing and post a comment below – it sounds interesting but I doubt I will actually try it.

Harvard Liberal Arts Faculty Votes to Make Their Research Open Source

Harvard Liberal Arts Faculty Votes to Distribute Research Free

Harvard’s decision lends support to the growing open-access movement in academia, an approach opposed by journal-industry representatives who say bypassing journals and their peer-review process may harm the quality of published research.

“This is a large and very important step for scholars throughout the country,” Stuart Shieber, a computer science professor who sponsored the motion to adopt the new policy, said in a statement released after the vote. “It should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated.”

Discussion of a similar move by the faculties of law, medicine and business are “well under way,” and the other faculties, such as education and government, are expected to consider it, Peter Kosewski, a spokesman for Harvard’s library system, said in an e-mail. No other votes are scheduled.

The policy would spur professors to distribute work free on a Harvard Web site, rather than through journals that charge subscribers “enormous amounts of money,” said Harry Lewis, a professor of computer science at the university. Authors could choose not to share their work on the site and could publish in a traditional journal.

Another good step for those that support science. As I have stated publicly funded universities should require open access. Privately funded universities I believe should decide to do so also, but it should be their choice. Government funded research should require open access publication.

Electrical Brain Stimulation Boosts Memory

Deep stimulation ‘boosts memory’

The technique involves implanting electrodes into the brain: in this case into an area in the limbic system called the hypothalamus, which is thought to control the appetite. When the electrodes were stimulated by electrical impulses the patient began to experience feelings of deja vu.

He then had a sudden perception of being in a park with friends. He felt younger, thought he was around 20-years-old, and his girlfriend of the time was there. He was an observer, and saw the scene in colour. As the intensity of the stimulation increased, details in the scene became more vivid.
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The results suggest it might be possible to use deep brain stimulation directly to boost memory. “We hopefully have found a circuit in the brain which can be modulated by stimulation, and which might provide benefit to patients with memory disorders,” said Professor Lozano. He is now leading a pilot study into whether deep brain stimulation can help people with early Alzheimer’s disease. They are initially testing six patients.

The Science of Kissing

The Differences in Gender — Sealed With a Kiss

In people, kissing to express affection is almost universal. About 90 percent of human cultures do it. One traditional view is that kissing, known scientifically as osculation, evolved from women chewing food for their children and giving it to them mouth-to-mouth, Fisher said.

But, she said, “I’ve never believed that,” adding that similar behavior is found in many species. Birds tap beaks. Elephants shove their trunks in each other’s mouths. Primates called bonobos practice their own version of French kissing. Fisher believes kissing is all about choosing the right mate.

“There’s so much information exchanged when you kiss someone that I just thought it must play a vital role in mate choice, and this paper is elegantly showing that,” Fisher said. A disproportionate amount of the brain, she noted, is geared toward interpreting signals from the mouth.

The research paper – Sex Differences in Romantic Kissing Among College Students: An Evolutionary Perspective

NSF Awards $50 Million for Collaborative Plant Biology Project

The National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced a $50 million award to a University of Arizona-led team to create the first national cyberinfrastructure center to tackle global “grand challenge” plant biology questions that have great implications on larger questions regarding the environment, agriculture, energy and the very organisms that sustain our existence on earth. The five-year project, dubbed the iPlant Collaborative, potentially is renewable for a second five years for a total of $100 million.

Like no other single research entity, the iPlant Collaborative will provide the capacity to draw upon resources and talent in remote locations and enable plant scientists, computer scientists and information scientists from around the world for the first time ever to collaboratively address questions of global importance and advance all of these fields. It will bring together and leverage the resources and information generated through the National Plant Genome Initiative, enabling more breadth and depth of research in every aspect of plant science.

“We are confident in the positive returns of this substantive investment in basic research,” said NSF Director Arden L. Bement. “The iPlant Collaborative will harness the best and the brightest scholars and research in plant biology in order to tackle some of the profound issues of our day and for our future. Challenges that may need plants for solutions include addressing the impacts of climate change, dwindling oil supply, decreasing agricultural land area, increasing population and environmental degradation.”
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Surprising New Diabetes Data

But these measures are only surrogates for disease. And in many cases, the connection between “better” numbers and better health is tenuous. In the case of cholesterol, many people won’t see a health benefit from lower numbers.

Now comes yet another sobering reminder that lowering a surrogate marker doesn’t necessarily bring better health. On Feb. 6, the National Institutes of Health announced it was halting a key trial for diabetes. Researchers had hoped the trial, dubbed ACCORD (Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes), would show that more aggressive lowering of blood sugar would significantly reduce deaths. Instead, the opposite happened. More people in the intensive treatment group died than in the group getting standard care. “A thorough review of the data shows that the medical treatment strategy of intensively reducing blood sugar below current clinical guidelines causes harm in these…patients,” says Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung & Blood Institute.

Scientific study often results in less than clear conclusions, especially in complex systems. There is great difficulty understanding what is actually going on, what interactions are present, what factors are significant, etc.. One of the great problems with the low level of scientific literacy in the USA is so many people think science is about simple absolute truth.

Scientific inquiry, especially related to health care, must attempt to gain insights from confusing signals. To gain scientific literacy one must understand basics concepts, like data is a proxy for what you aim to understand. To understand yourself you need to accept that science is not math. For a long time we are going to have to do our best to build up our understanding of human health (and other complex systems) as best we can. We need to be able to sort out what are solid conclusion, what are guesses, what seem like reasonable explanation and what level of confidence we can have in statements.

It is not enough to learn facts we need to be able to think scientifically and comprehend the subtleties surrounding the advances in scientific understanding. Some criticize newspapers and popular science for providing too simplistic a view of new scientific knowledge. While this can be a problem I really see the problem much more serious if people read obviously overly simplistic articles and don’t understand that it is just scratching the surface. The reader needs to take responsibility too. I enjoy many great articles that gloss over many of the details but provide a quick view of intriguing new breakthroughs.

Energy-Efficient Microchip

Team develops energy-efficient microchip

The key to the improvement in energy efficiency was to find ways of making the circuits on the chip work at a voltage level much lower than usual, Chandrakasan explains. While most current chips operate at around one volt, the new design works at just 0.3 volts.

Reducing the operating voltage, however, is not as simple as it might sound, because existing microchips have been optimized for many years to operate at the higher standard-voltage level. “Memory and logic circuits have to be redesigned to operate at very low power supply voltages,” Chandrakasan says.

One key to the new design, he says, was to build a high-efficiency DC-to-DC converter–which reduces the voltage to the lower level–right on the same chip, reducing the number of separate components. The redesigned memory and logic, along with the DC-to-DC converter, are all integrated to realize a complete system-on-a-chip solution.

One of the biggest problems the team had to overcome was the variability that occurs in typical chip manufacturing. At lower voltage levels, variations and imperfections in the silicon chip become more problematic. “Designing the chip to minimize its vulnerability to such variations is a big part of our strategy,” Chandrakasan says. “So far the new chip is a proof of concept. Commercial applications could become available “in five years, maybe even sooner, in a number of exciting areas”

Boiling Water And Plastic Spikes Bisphenol A Levels

Boiling water spikes bisphenol A levels

Adding boiling water to polycarbonate plastic bottles causes a dramatic spike in the amount of bisphenol A, or BPA, leaching from containers into drinks, according to a U.S. research team.

The finding suggests that parents sterilizing polycarbonate baby bottles by heating them in water or in a microwave may be inadvertently increasing the amount of the estrogen-mimicking chemical leaching from the containers. It also indicates hikers who use the bottles as a thermos to store hot tea or liquids may be doing the same.

The addition of boiling water increased BPA migration rates by up to 55-fold compared with water at room temperature, according to experiments run at the University of Cincinnati.

From Ghost Writing to Ghost Management in Medical Journals

Ghost Management: How Much of the Medical Literature Is Shaped Behind the Scenes by the Pharmaceutical Industry?

As discussed below, a substantial percentage of medical journal articles (in addition to meeting presentations and other forms of publication, which are not the focus here) are ghost managed, allowing the pharmaceutical industry considerable influence on medical research, and making that research a vehicle for marketing.

Ghost writing and honorary authorship are not in and of themselves scientific problems, though they become so when they shape science to meet particular interests [1]. Some honorary authors are senior professors and chairs of departments, who are added to articles because of local academic politics rather than at the request of drug companies [15,16].
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It has been repeatedly and firmly established that pharmaceutical company funding strongly biases published results in favor of the company’s products [17–19]. Ghost management amplifies that bias, because when one set of commercial interests exerts influence at multiple stages of research, writing, and publication, it will shape the resulting article.

This PLoS published essay includes 52 citations of studies in this area.

While they are clear to distinguish drug company influence on authors and other influence, I can see no justification for honorary authorships. Why can’t people just be honest. Is that really too high an expectation for scientists? Academic politics should not trump truth – especially for scientists. I can understand that traditionally claiming authors that were not actually authors has not been uncommon. But what reason is there to be dishonest in this way now? I don’t know of a good reason. Therefore it seems to me this practice should be seen as any other dishonest practice and those interested in finding the truth should stop making dishonest claims of authorship.
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Thinking Slime Moulds

Those amazing slime moulds

In other words, science has shown how unicellular organisms like the slime mould have the ability to learn and remember. Memory and learning seem to not be limited to us humans and can be found, as expected from an evolutionary perspective across organisms.

The amoeba Physarum polycephalum is quite a performer as it has been able to navigate mazes and solve simple puzzles.
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Nakagaki, T., Yamada, H. & A. TÃ³th. “Intelligence: Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism” Nature 407, 470 (2000).

The plasmodium of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum is a large amoeba-like cell consisting of a dendritic network of tube-like structures (pseudopodia). It changes its shape as it crawls over a plain agar gel and, if food is placed at two different points, it will put out pseudopodia that connect the two food sources. Here we show that this simple organism has the ability to find the minimum-length solution between two points in a labyrinth.

What Are Slime Moulds

Members of this class are commonly referred to as slime moulds. These have thought to belong to both animal and fungi kingdoms at one time or another. It’s now known that they are quite unrelated to animals and fungi and now are classified in the Kingdom Protista.

However slime moulds do exhibit characteristics of both fungi and animals. In the feeding stage, the slime moulds moves about as a mass of protoplasm (the plasmodium) feeding on bacteria, spores, and other organic matter much like an amoeba. When the food supply is exhausted or other unfavourable conditions occur, the plasmodium changes, taking on the appearance of a fungus.