Tim Lihoreau has offered a dozen or so but worries that they’re now getting cornea, which is rich given “Guten Organ”…”Play the lung game”…and “Colon tight to your dreams”. Speaking of ELO, “Endow Liver, Organs”.

Have you got the guts to be an organ donor? It’s a no brainer, even for the spineless…it doesn’t entrail much effort. How about a “Cut out and keep” teeshirt?

In the end they will paraphrase Brucie…”Kidney do well!”

Got the guts to be an organ donor? #EveryLittleBitHelps is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

They outline the wide range of compounds present in a huge number of foods and nutrients all of which might, if taken as part of a balanced approach to diet that avoids the conventional exercise-free junk food lifestyle, might just help society side step the growing epidemic of chronic inflammation and the diseases it brings.

Anti-inflammatory Response to Certain Foods.

Anti-inflammatory food is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

You can read the full story in my Chemistry World news update today. However, I have some additional comments on the technicalities of the work from team leader Georgios Koutroulakis of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Koutroulakis points out that working with highly pure plutonium(IV) oxide allowed them to achieve what others have been unable to do in fifty years. First, the non-magnetic ground state of the particular system studied helped them overcome the problem of the exceedingly short relaxation time (and huge resonance shift) of the plutonium-239 nucleus. “The energy gap between the ground state and the first excited magnetic state is quite large for the spins to dissipate their energy to the “lattice” in order to relax and, so, the relaxation time becomes reasonable and we can detect the signal,” he told me.

Cooling the system to close (4 Kelvin) to liquid helium temperatures was critical too. “At higher temperature it’s much easier for the spins to “hop” to higher energy states and consequently the relaxation becomes faster,” he explains. “For this reason exactly we went to low temperature, to assure that we were on average on the magnetic ground state hoping that T1 will be long enough and the shift small enough for us to be able able to observe the NMR signal, as proved to be the case.”

As to what they did differently from the many groups that have tried to obtain plutonium NMR spectra in the past: “The main limitation has been the very short T1/huge shift and, of course, the fact that people didn’t know where to look in terms of field-frequency without knowing the value of gamma-n. So, most of the relevant efforts have been concetrated on finding Pu-based materials in which, for one reason or another, these limitations are side-stepped, for instance systems with superconducting or antiferromagnetic ground states, but nothing had worked so far. We thought, contrary maybe to most people in the field, that working on a very pure sample of plutonium(IV) oxide in which Pu ions show a non-magnetic ground state we might have a chance to overcome the aforementioned limitations and observe the signal.”

Koutroulakis adds that his team was “clever” to choose the right system in which to look for the Pu NMR signal. “This, in combination with our very well-equipped NMR laboratory and exceptional knowhow (most NMR chemists, for example, cannot sweep their magnetic field and most solid-state NMR physicists don’t have access to such high-quality Pu-based samples), a lot of perseverance and patience (we had to try very long, time-consuming field sweeps with lots of different experimental/detection parameters), and a touch of luck of course (actually, we detected the signal when we were about to give up!) led to our finding.”

I asked NMR expert Ian Farnan of the University of Cambridge to comment on the importance of the work, he told me the first mention of the results was at a conference back in February. “It is an important breakthrough in actinide science as it provides an element specific insight into the local structural and magnetic environment of Pu in a range of materials,” Farnan says. “We have thought of searching for its resonance ourselves but have been put off by the wide frequency range and the low likelihood of lack of success. The Los Alamos group has to be congratulated and thanked because it is a great effort that opens up the field,” he adds.

Farnan and his colleagues have concentrated on the observation of NMR active ligands, such as oxygen-17 attached to actinides such as Pu using the magic-angle spinning (MAS) technique. This technique provides the high resolution that is required to distinguish subtle structural differences between local atomic environments in solids. “We are adapting the NMR equipment at the European Commission Joint Research Centre Institute for Transuranic Elements for 239Pu observation,” he adds. “This possibility will be available to scientists through the EC FP7 programme EURACT-NMR.”

H. Yasuoka, G. Koutroulakis, H. Chudo, S. Richmond, D. K. Veirs, A. I. Smith, E. D. Bauer, J. D. Thompson, G. D. Jarvinen, D. L. Clark (2012). Observation of 239 Pu Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Science, 336, 901-904 : 10.1126/science.1220801

Spinning up plutonium is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

There is far too much squeamishness regarding organ donation and transplant. Some of it is down to emotional attachment and denial, which is to be expected. Much of it is due to our own death anxiety, again an evolutionarily adaptation one can assume. Then there’s the question of religion, which muddies the waters of many a debate.

Regardless, it is time to break the taboos and quell the squeamishness. The potential for social media is great in this regard. If an 83-year old British man can donate a kidney to an anonymous recipient, purely altruistically and claim his fifteen minutes of fame in life, then each of us should stand up and be counted before it’s too late. Opt into the donor generation, tweet it, update your Facebook page, Google+ about it. Of course, breaking taboos needs slogans, so how about a few to get started…

Kidneys out! And proud

I have a spleen!

Too many broken hearts in the world (need a transplant)

Every little (organ) helps

Transplantation, that’s the name of the game

Hearts out for the lads

I only have eyes for you (and liver, kidneys and more)

A stitch in time, saves lives

Show me yours and I’ll give you mine

When will there be an organ harvest for the world?

And one for Apple fans: iDonate

Organ donors on Facebook and Twitter is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

I talked to Christian Moni-Bidin of the University of the Conception, Chile, who has demonstrated that one of the predictions for dark matter simply fails in his team’s detailed observations. “There seems to be a rapidly increasing evidence that things could not be as we thought,” Moni-Bidin told me. His work, based on galactic dynamics, is just another experiment in a string of findings that seem to suggest dark matter may be stranger than we could imagine or simply not exist at all.

“[Our] finding you mention [in Pivot Points] is certainly interesting,” he adds, “but you can insert it in a series: for example, a few days before the publication of my work, Karachentsev showed a surprising lack of dark matter in the entire local universe (arXiv:1204.3377), while some time ago Jalocha et al. (2010, MNRAS, 407, 1689) also reached similar conclusions from a different point of view.” Moni-Bidin asks whether we are witnessing a radical change in our understanding of the Universe but admits that, “It’s probably too early to tell.”

There are plenty of theories that have been proposed to explain the observed and predicted effects of dark matter. As a general rule, we can say that, either dark matter exists, or you have to modify the theory of gravity and relativity to make it fit the equations. “I feel we should not favour one explanation over another at this early stage, but they should be certainly tested,” Moni-Bidin adds. Although his research and that of others would suggest that dark matter may not be as it seems, it does fit with theory.

“As I see it, the main problem is that dark matter, once introduced, does not only explain this, but it also works well in many other fields, very different from galactic rotation (but always concerning gravity), such as the formation of galaxies, gravitational lensing, the early Universe, and so on,” he told me. “At the moment, none of the alternative theories is able to have this broad success on many different field.”

So, the evidence is falling, but maybe we’re not quite ready to throw out dark matter just yet. However, if an experiment is done that contradicts the theory, then we must conclude that the theory needs fixing. As Feynman once said: “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”

Some of our dark matter is missing is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

From the first home computer to the ARM chip in almost every mobile phone, from the sequencing of the human genome to the development of ‘magic bullet’ drugs, ideas developed by the technology cluster in Cambridge have changed the world in which we live:

• Over 20 billion ARM based chips shipped, found in almost all the world’s mobile phones.
• IVF, now responsible for over 4 million babies worldwide.
• Acorn BBC micro, used almost universally in British schools from its birth into the 1990s.
• Kinect hands-free control technology for Xbox 360.
• The world’s first webcam, was pointed at the coffee pot in the computer science department of the University of Cambridge.
• Concorde’s drooping nose cone and retracting visor.
• Sinclair ZX80, the world’s first affordable home computer.
• Sequencing of the human genome, creating knowledge for a new generation of medicine.
• In-flight refuelling capability, for Hercules aircraft developed in 19 days during Falkland’s War Crisis.
• Iris Recognition used in cross-border control worldwide.

The Cambridge Phenomenon is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

Have any Sciencebase readers tried this stuff? Do you think it works? It’s difficult to know what effect it might have given that part of the stimulant effect of coffee and other caffeine-containing drinks is partially psychosomatic (people report feeling pepped up only to discover they were drinking decaff all along). Plasma analysis would definitely demonstrate raised caffeine metabolism regardless though.

Red Ferret and others have been talking about a “herbal” treatment – Rutaesomn – that is supposed to deactivate any caffeine you have had and so help you sleep. Aside from the fact that the marketing says it’s “drug free”, which if it’s physiologically active it cannot be except as a matter of semantics, the research would also suggest that the average person would need far more than is in a single bottle of 30 tablets of the product for it to have any effect.

The active component in Rutaesomn seems to be an alkaloid called rutaecarpine. There is a paper from 2011 in Arch Pharm Res that studied its effects on rats. Apparently, 80 milligrams of the stuff per kilogram of body mass in the lab rats (given each day for three days before administering with caffeine) is enough to raise two liver enzymes sufficiently to promote caffeine metabolism and subsequent excretion of the metabolite. So, there may very well be a mechanism for efficacy.

However, the product contains just 100 milligrams of rutaecarpine per tablet and there are 30 in a bottle. An average adult male human weighing 80 kg and hoping to see an effect would based have to ingest 6400 milligrams of the active ingredient for three days to experience the same relative activity as was observed in the rats. That’s a couple of bottles of the stuff every day for three days before you could have a coffee.

There is the issue of translating from a rat model to humans, however, and ratio of body surface area rather than weight is often used as conversion factor, which would mean that you’d need rather less than my suggested 6400 mg to be taking the equivalent of the rats in the study.

It would be so much easier, if you fancied a good night’s sleep, simply to avoid the double espresso after your evening meal or cut back on the caffeinated “energy drinks”. Surely…

via Rutaesomn.

Can Rutaesomn decaf your body? #herbal is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

Anyway, here’s the exhibition’s video trailer, and yes they do have some samples of Einstein’s brains. Apparently, he wanted to be cremated but someone took his brain and donated it on his behalf to science.

Brains is free entry and runs until 17th June at the Wellcome Collection on Euston Road, London. Leonardo is on until 7th October, I believe booking for Leo is essential.

Wellcome to Brains is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

As we departed just after 10am, when the “public” began to arrive, we were greeted by high-security as it was almost the hour for the aforementioned Liz and Phil (QEII and the Duke of Edinburgh) to head off in their carriage to the House of Lords for the State Opening of Parliament. It seemed churlish not to take a few snaps (you can see those on my Facebook page here) before departing to the sound of a multi-gun salute that caused not a few shivers and noisy remarks among camera-wielding American tourists heading to Buckingham Palace who’d missed all the pomp and sight of the Queen not five minutes earlier, presumably through circumstances beyond their control.

Up to Green Park tube and a quick link to Leicester Square to meet up with the mighty Tim Lihoreau Creative Director at ClassicFM whose studios look out over the Square’s glitzy cinemas and the newly installed pavement fountains (we’re unsure as to whether they will be illuminated water jets, it’s likely). A quick tour of the studios of Classic, Xfm, Heart etc all in the Capital Radio building and a little sushi on the terrace and discussions of all things technical and otherwise. Science certainly meets art here in the high-tech digital audio realm.

After lunch, a visit to the Wellcome Collection to take a look at Brains, their fascinating exhibition about probably the most complicated object in the universe – the human brain. Followed by a cuppa with my book publisher Olivia Bays from Elliot and Thompson to discuss my progress on Deceived Wisdom and the international book tour…well maybe not that last part, but certainly we covered the ins and outs of the evolving contents list. A dash from Euston Road to King’s Cross station was in vain, but catching the later and slower, stopping train back to Cambridge gave me plenty of time to download and edit photos.

Buck House, Queeny, classically speaking brains and book publishers is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

Leonardo da Vinci is, to some, nothing more than a great artist, but to us scientists, he was a pioneering polymath. His ground-breaking studies of the human body, which are now on display in the largest-ever exhibition of his anatomical work, were centuries ahead of his time. The exhibition launches almost 500 years after Leonardo’s death and features 87 pages from his notebooks, including 24 sides of previously unexhibited material.

After Leonardo’s death in 1519, his drawings remained unpublished and were effectively lost to the world until the 20th century. Meanwhile, Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius published his treatise, De humani corporis fabrica (On the fabric of the human body) in 1543. This tome would become the most important work on anatomy ever published and to this day anatomical history is divided into pre- and post-Vesalian periods.

Leonardo’s drawings are quite astounding as is the fact that all of his writing is a mirror image of what you would expect. This was not, however, meant to deceive or hide information. Indeed, at the time the dissection of human bodies was perfectly well accepted by the Church and the law, this was the renaissance after all and Leonardo very much wanted the knowledge he acquired and his life works to be published. Curator Martin Clayton told me that the true reason was nothing less mundane than that Leonardo didn’t want to smudge his ink as he wrote left-handed, something not uncommon among those who could write 500 years ago.

Leonardo’s dissection of human tissues (usually male cadavers of executed criminals) and those of animals are quite astounding in their accuracy and his famous dissection of a human skull displays to the modern anatomist’s eye an insight into what cuts would best reveal the inner details perfectly. The understanding of many physiological processes, such as breathing (lungs simply cooled the heart), the brain had three chambers, the purpose and flow of blood (arteries carried blood from the heart, the liver made blood and secreted it into the veins) were, to put it kindly, totally wrong.

There was also the question of sex and how the spirit or soul fitted into the process of conception. In his earlier work, Leonardo showed the penis having two tubes one of which carried the material part of the male seed, the other carried the “animal spirit” down from the spine and into the woman. This was obviously an attempt to explain the duality of the human condition – mind and matter – and to reconcile the newly emerging science with the fictions of creationism. Leonardo correctly abandoned the two-pipe system in later work.

As to the pregnancy itself, given that female cadavers were less readily available than those of male criminals, Leonardo’s work on the anatomy of a pregnant female was informed by his work on the dissection of a cow. His drawings show the multiple placentas, the ovaries placed beneath the uterus and the ernormous suspensory ligaments within the female, all of which is perfect for bearing a growing calf, but is not present in the human.

One image that is missing from the collection is, of course, the Vitruvian Man, perhaps one of the most iconic and famous works of art. The Vitruvian Man was drawn after Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio who suggested that somehow the perfect man could with arms and legs akimbo transect a perfect circle and a perfect square. In his work, Leonardo measure lengths, ratios and angles but could not find the perfect ratios suggested by Vitruvius 1500 years before. Instead, he obtained odd fractions 5/11′s, 7/17th’s none of which seemed to point to the perfect circle or the perfect man and Leonardo turned back from this dead-end. If you want to see his Vitruvian Man, it is housed at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, Italy, but occasionally displayed.

Despite the occasional misconception and U-turn, Leonardo’s dissections and drawings were highly precise, incredibly detailed and literally centuries ahead of their time. The exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist brings his cadavers to life at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 7th October 2012.

An astounding iPad app is also available for download from the iTunes store. The app not only allows you to zoom in on very high resolution scans of the different works but has accompanying text as well as a reverse magnifier for Leonardo’s writing. Poke his text and an English translation appears too. Very much worth the price especially as it includes all 268 human and animal anatomical drawings by Leonardo in the collection. The app also includes video commentary and modern, interactive anatomical models.

With thanks to Rachel Woollen of the Royal Collection for the invitation to a fascinating exhibition.

I have posted bigger versions of my photos from the exhibition on Facebook.

The rights and lefts of Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog