Category Archives: Science

Merck and Elsevier Publish Phony Peer-Review Journal

Elsevier is one of those publishers fighting open science. They try to claim that the government publishing government funded research in an open way will tarnish science. The argument makes no sense to me. Here is another crazy action on their part: they published a “journal” funded by Merck to promote Merck products. Merck Makes Phony Peer-Review Journal:

Merck cooked up a phony, but real sounding, peer reviewed journal and published favorably looking data for its products in them. Merck paid Elsevier to publish such a tome, which neither appears in MEDLINE or has a website, according to The Scientist.
…
What’s sad is that I’m sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, “As published in Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications….” Said doctor, or even the average researcher wouldn’t know that the journal is bogus. In fact, knowing that the journal is published by Elsevier gives it credibility!

As I have said the journals fighting open science should have their credibility questioned. They are putting their outdated business model above science. We should not see organizations that are focused on closing science research through deceptive publicity efforts and lobbying efforts as credible.

New Largest Known Cave

photo of world's largest known cave, in Vietnam

The world’s largest cave

A British caving team believe they have discovered the world’s largest cave passage in the heart of the Vietnamese jungle. The rocky passage is 150metres long and measures a towering 200metres in height – seven times as high as the vaulted ceiling of York Cathedral.
…
Called Hang Son Doong (Mountain River Cave) it is believed to be almost twice the size of the current record holder
…
The cave was originally discovered in 1991 by a Vietnamese Jungle man called Ho Khanh. However Mr Spillane said no-one had entered if before because ‘it emitted a frightful wind and noise which was due to a large underground river’.

Influenza Pandemic Alert Raised to Level 5 (of 6)

WHO Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan, announced today that she has “decided to raise the current level of influenza pandemic alert from phase 4 to phase 5.” And she further comments:

Let me remind you. New diseases are, by definition, poorly understood. Influenza viruses are notorious for their rapid mutation and unpredictable behaviour. WHO and health authorities in affected countries will not have all the answers immediately, but we will get them.

WHO will be tracking the pandemic at the epidemiological, clinical, and virological levels. All countries should immediately activate their pandemic preparedness plans. Countries should remain on high alert for unusual outbreaks of influenza-like illness and severe pneumonia.

At this stage, effective and essential measures include heightened surveillance, early detection and treatment of cases, and infection control in all health facilities.

I have reached out to companies manufacturing antiviral drugs to assess capacity and all options for ramping up production. I have also reached out to influenza vaccine manufacturers that can contribute to the production of a pandemic vaccine.

The biggest question, right now, is this: how severe will the pandemic be, especially now at the start?

It is possible that the full clinical spectrum of this disease goes from mild illness to severe disease. We need to continue to monitor the evolution of the situation to get the specific information and data we need to answer this question.

From past experience, we also know that influenza may cause mild disease in affluent countries, but more severe disease, with higher mortality, in developing countries.

No matter what the situation is, the international community should treat this as a window of opportunity to ramp up preparedness and response.

Above all, this is an opportunity for global solidarity as we look for responses and solutions that benefit all countries, all of humanity. After all, it really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic.

As I have said, we do not have all the answers right now, but we will get them.
—- end of her remarks —-
The latest WHO Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response release puts the total number of confirmed cases at 148, in 9 countries, with 8 deaths. Mexico has many more suspected cases but just 26 confirmed cases. The CDC Swine Influenza site, puts the total number of confirmed cases in the USA at 91, in 10 states, with 1 death.

President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

Today, during remarks at the National Academy of Sciences, President Barack Obama announced the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

PCAST is an advisory group of the nation’s leading scientists and engineers who will advise the President and Vice President and formulate policy in the many areas where understanding of science, technology, and innovation is key to strengthening our economy and forming policy that works for the American people.

President Barack Obama said, “This council represents leaders from many scientific disciplines who will bring a diversity of experience and views. I will charge PCAST with advising me about national strategies to nurture and sustain a culture of scientific innovation.”

PCAST will be co-chaired by John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Eric Lander, Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project; and Harold Varmus, President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, former head of the National Institutes of Health and a Nobel laureate.

Members of the council include: Shirley Ann Jackson, Craig Mundie, Eric Schmidt and Ahmed Zewail.

Lenz’s Law in Action: Eddy Current Tubes

Eddy Current Tubes — Drop the Magnets down the tube. An eddy current is set up in a conductor in response to a changing magnetic field. Lenz’s law predicts that the current moves in such a way as to create a magnetic field opposing the change; to do this in a conductor, electrons swirl in a plane perpendicular to the changing magnetic field.

Because the magnetic fields of the eddy currents oppose the magnetic field of the falling magnet; there is attraction between the two fields. Energy is converted into heat. This principle is used in damping the oscillation of the lever arm of mechanical balances.

Evolutionary Robotics

Evolutionary Robotics, chapter of Handbook of Robotics, is interesting and includes a good explanation of the difference between evolution and learning:

Evolution and learning (or phylogenetic and ontogenetic
adaptation) are two forms of biological adaptation that differ in space and time. Evolution is a process of selective reproduction and substitution based on the existence of a population of individuals displaying variability at the genetic level. Learning, instead, is a set of modifications taking place within each single individual during its own life time.

Evolution and learning operate on different time scales. Evolution is a form of adaptation capable of capturing relatively slow environmental changes that

might encompass several generations (e.g., the perceptual characteristics of food sources for a given species). Learning, instead, allows an individual to adapt to environmental modifications that are unpredictable at the generational level. Learning might include a variety of mechanisms that produce adaptive changes in an individual during its lifetime, such as physical development, neural maturation, variation of the connectivity between neurons, and synaptic plasticity. Finally, whereas evolution operates on the genotype, learning affects only the phenotype and phenotypic modifications cannot directly modify the genotype.
…
Recent research showed that teams of evolved robots can: (a) develop robust and effective behavior, (b) display an ability to differentiate their behavior so
to better cooperate; (c) develop communication capabilities and a shared communication system.

Artificial Intelligence Finds Ancient Indus Script Matches Spoken Language

Artificial Intelligence Cracks 4,000-Year-Old Mystery by Brandon Keim

An ancient script that’s defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers.
…
The Indus script, used between 2,600 and 1,900 B.C. in what is now eastern Pakistan and northwest India, belonged to a civilization as sophisticated as its Mesopotamian and Egyptian contemporaries. However, it left fewer linguistic remains. Archaeologists have uncovered about 1,500 unique inscriptions from fragments of pottery, tablets and seals. The longest inscription is just 27 signs long.
…
They fed the program sequences of four spoken languages: ancient Sumerian, Sanskrit and Old Tamil, as well as modern English. Then they gave it samples of four non-spoken communication systems: human DNA, Fortran, bacterial protein sequences and an artificial language.

The program calculated the level of order present in each language. Non-spoken languages were either highly ordered, with symbols and structures following each other in unvarying ways, or utterly chaotic. Spoken languages fell in the middle.

When they seeded the program with fragments of Indus script, it returned with grammatical rules based on patterns of symbol arrangement. These proved to be moderately ordered, just like spoken languages.

Nanoparticles With Scorpion Venom Slow Cancer Spread

In a, chlorotoxin molecules, colored blue and green, attach themselves to a central nanoparticle. In b, each nanoprobe offers many chlorotoxin molecules that can simultaneously latch on to many MMP-2s, depicted here in yellow, which are thought to help tumor cells travel through the body. In c, over time nanoprobes draw more and more of the MMP-2 surface proteins into the cell, slowing the tumor’s spread. Image from the University of Washington.

University of Washington researchers found they could cut the spread of cancerous cells by 98 percent, compared to 45 percent for the scorpion venom alone, by combining nanoparticles with a scorpion venom compound already being investigated for treating brain cancer.

For more than a decade scientists have looked at using chlorotoxin, a small peptide isolated from scorpion venom, to target and treat cancer cells. Chlorotoxin binds to a surface protein overexpressed by many types of tumors, including brain cancer. Previous research by Miqin Zhang‘s group combined chlorotoxin with nanometer-scale particles of iron oxide, which fluoresce at that size, for both magnetic resonance and optical imaging.

Chlorotoxin also disrupts the spread of invasive tumors — specifically, it slows cell invasion, the ability of the cancerous cell to penetrate the protective matrix surrounding the cell and travel to a different area of the body to start a new cancer. The MMP-2 on the cell’s surface, which is the binding site for chlorotoxin, is hyperactive in highly invasive tumors such as brain cancer. Researchers believe MMP-2 helps the cancerous cell break through the protective matrix to invade new regions of the body. But when chlorotoxin binds to MMP-2, both get drawn into the cancerous cell.

Research showed that the cells containing nanoparticles plus chlorotoxin were unable to elongate, whereas cells containing only nanoparticles or only chlorotoxin could stretch out. This suggests that the nanoparticle-plus-chlorotoxin disabled the machinery on the cell’s surface that allows cells to change shape, yet another step required for a tumor cell to slip through the body.

So far most cancer research has combined nanoparticles either with chemotherapy that kills cancer cells, or therapy seeking to disrupt the genetic activity of a cancerous cell. This is the first time that nanoparticles have been combined with a therapy that physically stops cancer’s spread.

Full press release

Amazonian Ant Species is All Female, Reproduces By Cloning

Ants inhabit ‘world without sex’

The ants reproduce via cloning – the queen ants copy themselves to produce genetically identical daughters. This species – the first ever to be shown to reproduce entirely without sex – cultivates a garden of fungus, which also reproduces asexually.
…
Dr Himler’s interest in Mycocepurus smithii was originally sparked not by their unusually biased sex ratio, but by their ability to cultivate crops. “Ants discovered farming long before we did – they have been cultivating fungus gardens for an estimated 80 million years.

“They collect plant material, insect faeces and even dead insects from the forest floor and feed it to their crops,” she said.

Home Experiment: Deriving the Gravitational Constant

Deriving the Gravitational Constant by Joe Marshall

In the summer of 1985 I was at home convalescing and being bored. It occurred to me one day that if Cavendish could determine the gravitational constant back in 1798, I ought to be able to do something similar
…
Cavendish cast a pair of 1.61 pound lead weights. I found a couple of 2-pound lead cylinders my dad had lying around. I used duct tape to attach them to a 3-foot wooden dowel. Cavendish used a wire to suspend the balance, I used nylon monofilament. To determine the torsion of the fiber, you wait until the balance stops moving (a day or two) and then you slightly perturb it. The balance will slowly oscillate back and forth. The restoring force is calculated from the period of oscillation. Cavendish had a 7-minute period. My balance had a 40 minute period (nylon is nowhere near as stiff as wire).

Cavendish used a pair of 350 pound lead balls to attract the ends of the balance from about 9 inches away. I put a couple of 8 pound jugs of water about an inch away. The next trick was to measure the rotation of the balance. Cavendish had a small telescope to read the Vernier scale on the balance. I used some modern technology. I borrowed a laser from Tom Knight (Thanks again!), and bounced it off a mirror that I mounted on the middle of the balance. This made a small red dot on the wall about 20 feet away. (I was hoping this would be enough to measure the displacement, but I was considering an interferometer if necessary.)

To my surprise, it all worked. After carefully putting the jugs of water in place, the dot on the wall started to visibly move. Within a few minutes, it had moved an inch or two. I carefully removed the jugs of water and sure enough, the dot on the wall drifted back to its starting position.

Very cool example of a home physics experiment.