Category Archives: Science

More Dinosaurs Fighting Against Open Science

Controversy at the American Chemical Society by John Dupuis

So, what’s my take on this? First of all, I’m not surprised. Unfortunately there are some scholarly societies that operate more like for-profits when it comes to their publishing arms and ACS is certainly one of the most notable for that sort of thing. While it should be shocking that ACS is acting more like Elsevier than Elsevier at times, sadly it isn’t.

Secondly, what should we, as librarians do about it? Mostly we need to advocate. We need to push our vendors towards business models that favour open access, we need to reassure them that we’re interested in a sustainable model for scholarly publishing

I agree. It is sad that so many organizations distort behavior though poor management structures but that is the world we live in. My management improvement blog focused on how to manage better. And I have posted several times about the need to shift our support to open access science and away from those who want continue outdated strategies that restrict the advancement of scientific ideas.

Why Planes Fly: What They Taught You In School Was Wrong

So we all know how planes fly, right? The top of the wing is rounded and the bottom of the wing is more straight. Air takes longer to travel over the top of the wing than the bottom, which results in more pressure on the bottom, hence the lift. Right? As it turns out, no.

This is what I was taught, and it’s what I’ve always believed (it’s even in most lower-level text books), but it’s simply not true. The concept is called the Bernoulli Principle, and it accounts for very little of the lift that makes flight possible. The main reason planes fly is far simpler: wings force air downward, which in turn pushes the wings upward.

The primary actor here is the the Coanda Effect, with the Bernoulli Principle taking a supporting role. It all starts with the air wrapping downward along the back of the wing (Coanda).

Nanoengineers Use Tiny Diamonds for Drug Delivery

Nanoengineers Mine Tiny Diamonds for Drug Delivery

Northwestern University researchers have shown that nanodiamonds — much like the carbon structure as that of a sparkling 14 karat diamond but on a much smaller scale — are very effective at delivering chemotherapy drugs to cells without the negative effects associated with current drug delivery agents.
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To make the material effective, Ho and his colleagues manipulated single nanodiamonds, each only two nanometers in diameter, to form aggregated clusters of nanodiamonds, ranging from 50 to 100 nanometers in diameter. The drug, loaded onto the surface of the individual diamonds, is not active when the nanodiamonds are aggregated; it only becomes active when the cluster reaches its target, breaks apart and slowly releases the drug. (With a diameter of two to eight nanometers, hundreds of thousands of diamonds could fit onto the head of a pin.)

“The nanodiamond cluster provides a powerful release in a localized place — an effective but less toxic delivery method,” said co-author Eric Pierstorff, a molecular biologist and post-doctoral fellow in Ho’s research group. Because of the large amount of available surface area, the clusters can carry a large amount of drug, nearly five times the amount of drug carried by conventional materials.

The Chemistry of Hair Coloring

Scientists Develop the First Significant Advance in Hair Dye in 50 Years by Kristen Philipkoski

Hair color is serious chemistry. Getting color into that hair shaft is no joke. That’s why Procter & Gamble employs 1,800 “beauty scientists” around the globe. I spoke to two of these beauty scientists this week who told me they have invented a kinder hair color, and that it marks the first significant advance in dye jobs in 50 years.
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Small, diffuse color molecules enter the hair, and while they’re inside, they oxidize and form a chemical reaction with a larger color molecule that’s already trapped in there. But the small molecules aren’t all that selective about who they get it on with, and they end up breaking some of the chemical bonds that hold hair together. That releases free radicals that make hair weaker and less able to resist things like aggressive brushing, blow-drying and ironing.
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So the beauty scientists came up with a whole new chemistry for getting the lightening molecules inside the hair. First, the new process works at a much lower pH. That makes it less alkaline, so it strips away much less of the lipid coating.

Live Long and Prosper

Live Long and Prosper: A Conversation with Cynthia Kenyon:

Cynthia Kenyon, PhD, director of the UCSF’s Larry L. Hillblom Center for the Biology of Aging, smiles a lot these days. And with good reason. She has aging cornered and she knows it. In less than 20 years, her once-crazy idea – that genes regulate aging – has not only gone mainstream, but spawned a huge field of research with giant conclaves and dozens of journal articles published every year.
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One of Kenyon’s lab rotation students – Ramon Tabtiang – in one of his very first experiments, picked a needle out of the haystack that is the C. elegans genome. In short, he found a mutant gene, dubbed daf-2, that made worms live twice as long. C. elegans was — and is — a favorite model for developmental biologists and geneticists because its simple structure and entire three-week life are easily scrutinized under the microscope.

Watching the mutant worms, says Kenyon, was like “witnessing a miracle.” Not only did these worms live longer, they retained good muscle tone, squirmed, sought food and stayed youthful. In comparison, normal, or wild, worms of the same two-week age were flabby, tattered and sedentary. They looked old. The message was clear. The rate of aging was not “fixed in stone,” after all. It could be slowed.

In the years since, Kenyon and her team have made more eye-popping discoveries, including the role of a companion gene, called daf-16, that controls on or off signals in still other genes. Learning more about the insulin pathway in which these genes operate helped her to understand a cascade of signals and responses as they reverberate through individual tissues.

Better yet, by using this information to tweak here and there in the worm genome, Kenyon and her laboratory colleagues have been able to extend a worm’s life up to six times the normal span, with no significant decline in vitality until late in life.

Real-Time Evolution

Real-Time Evolution, Researchers find evidence that a variety of African electric fish may be approaching speciation:

Researchers from Cornell University found that genetically identical fish are sending out two different electric signals, and certain male members of the species ignore some signals emitted by females, responding only to pulses similar to their own. The strict selectivity for specific signals observed in these electric fish may eventually result in different mating groups, leading researchers to surmise that the fish could be on the verge of speciation.

“Evolution is a historical, inferential science—you can’t really see it happening before your eyes,” said Matt Arnegard, a neurobiology and behavior postdoc at Cornell and lead author of the study, which appears in the June issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology. “We think maybe this is an example where we’re really close to seeing it happen before our eyes.”

Monarch Butterfly Migration

Monarch Butterfly

Helping track the monarch butterfly migration is a very cool interactive learning projects for students. The Monarch Butterfly Journey North site includes a great wealth of resource with real time reports and answers to science questions.:

A massive migration across Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Kansas this week resulted in the most spectacular sightings of the season. Most miraculous was the mile of clustering monarchs discovered on Sunday in a sunflower field in Kansas. Just think…It’s the first week of October and migrating monarchs are still being spotted across the north.

From the Monarchs in the Classroom website:

Unlike most other insects in temperate climates, monarch butterflies cannot survive a long cold winter. Every fall, North American monarchs fly south to spend the winter at roosting sites. Monarchs are the only butterflies to make such a long, two-way migration, flying up to 3000 miles in the fall to reach their winter destination. Amazingly, they fly in masses to the same winter roosts, often to the exact same trees. Their migration is more the type we expect from birds or whales than insects. However, unlike birds and whales, individuals only make the round-trip once. It is their children’s grandchildren that return south the following fall.

Monarch Travels (2006 post)

To test their ability to reorient themselves, Dr. Taylor has moved butterflies from Kansas to Washington, D.C. If he releases them right away, he said, they take off due south, as they would have where they were. But if he keeps them for a few days in mesh cages so they can see the sun rise and set, “they reset their compass heading,” he said. “The question is: How?”

Proposal to Triple NSF GFRP Awards and the Size of the Awards by 33%

Hillary Clinton’s Innovation Agenda (press release from the campaign):

Triple the number of NSF fellowships and increase the size of each award by 33 percent. At present, the NSF offers approximately 1,000 fellowships per year. This number is not much changed from the 1960s, although the number of college students graduating with science and engineering degrees has grown three fold. The NSF fellowship is the key financial resource for science and engineering graduate students. Hillary will increase the number of fellowships to 3,000 per year. She will also increase each award from $30,000 to $40,000 per year (simultaneously, she will increase the NSF award to each recipient’s school from $10,500 per recipient to $14,000 per recipient to help cover educational costs).

That sounds great to me. I have talked about this before: Increasing American Fellowship Support for Scientists and Engineers. I work for ASEE on the IT systems in support of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Operation Center (the ASEE portion of the program) and other engineering fellowship programs). This blog is my own and is not affiliated with ASEE.

The proposed legislation on Graduate Scholar Awards in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math also has a similar aim and commitment. Here is a post from 2005 on similar proposals. As I mentioned in The Innovation Agenda, 2005 while I agree with this spending I also believe what I said then:

Currently the United States has over $8,000,000,000,000 (that is over $8 trillion – see current count) in debt (increasing by over $400 Billion a year). That brings every person’s share to over $27,000. Given that, it seems reckless to just add spending without either cutting something else or increasing taxes and I don’t see those details in the innovation agenda.

The debt now? Over $9,000,000,000,000 (increasing more than $1.4 billion a day for the last year). More on Washington taxing future generations to pay for what we spend today.

The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett

The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett. Review by, Andrea Barrett:

Andrea Barrett is a lyrical novelist of the American past, giving life to pioneers in science with such resonance that even readers who wrestled mightily with chemistry come away entranced by her evocative accounts of discovery.

The winner of a MacArthur fellowship and the National Book Award (for the 1996 short-story collection Ship Fever) and a Pulitzer finalist (for the 2003 Servants of the Map), Barrett is taken with an earlier time, when the country was much smaller and exploration – pushing boundaries in science, geography and knowledge – mattered far more than it does today. Science moved the country forward and outward, and into the greater world.
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In this age, and in Barrett’s writings, scientists are holding the lamp to lead Americans out of the darkness, and patients away from death. (Curiously, this is the second novel in a year to refer to the diminutive electrical pioneer Charles Steinmetz, a major figure in Starling Lawrence’s The Lightning Keeper, an equally romantic, though less taut and accomplished, novel.)

Science and Engineering Fellowship Applications Open Now

Some of the science and engineering fellowship applications that are currently open: