course of medication

Via Slashdot, we learn that a novel organic chemical compound has been isolated by an artificial intelligence trained on the corpus of literature of pathology and drug-resistance that potentially has powerful implications for continuing to combat infectious disease and make amends for the systematic abuse of antibiotics (over-prescribing, battery livestock, wastewater, etc.) that threatens to revert medical science to that of the Middle Ages.
The compound, named halcine after HAL 9000 by one member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, seems to put back in our quiver the means to deal with the most pernicious strains of multi-resistant compounds that make environments that ought to be sterile incubators for germs that have become immune to traditional medicine through over-use and over-exposure. Furthermore, given the expense that new drugs trials entail—making their development a pricy trade-off despite the benefit of lives saved, being able to find leads to follow from computer models may usher the best contenders to the laboratory first.

käsecore

When I first caught the headline of this study, I assumed it meant that Hip Hop did something to stimulate the taste buds rather than having aged wheels of Emmentaler (hobby cheesemaker’s Beat Wampfler’s signature Muttenglück) in immersive soundscapes for six months. I was a bit sceptical about the claims that each sample, exposed to different musical genres, displayed a different taste profile but indeed sonic chemistry is a discipline that researchers are just beginning to appreciate and explore. Reportedly, the cheese aged accompanied by Hip Hop turned out zestier and the quintessentially Swiss cheese had bigger holes—eyes, in the trade.

iupac

Via Digg, the United Nations has declared 2019 to be the Year of the Periodic Table in recognition of the moment of insight that Dmitri Mendeleev had one hundred-fifty years ago in 1869 when he committed each of the sixty-nine then known distinct chemical elements on note cards and arranged them by properties in such a fashion as to predict, forecast the existence of yet unknown substances that would later fall neatly in place.
Not to discount the genius of the moment, the development of the familiar design was a lengthy process with many alternate proposals, visual cul-de-sacs (see also here, here and here) and effort that draws off the research and inspiration of many that came before and tried to communicate some essential quality about the building blocks of Nature. In addition to the symbolic chemistry that John Dalton proffered in 1803 to help limn his modern Atomic Theory, the Conversation takes a look at the other stages and versions—with some more radical deviations—that culminate with the iconic and instantly recognisable classroom model.

olfactory bulb

Via Marginal Revolution, we are introduced to artist Sissel Tolaas celebrates the olfactory when the world becomes estrangingly deodorised, enshrining everything that’s visceral and memorable about the often derided sense of smell.
Her brave and unabashed landscapes perfumed with perhaps what we’d as soon forget create a odour distinctive to time and place and craft a unique narrative with each waft—telegraphing specific characteristics that rather defy digitalisation and the usual heraldic shorthand, though our sensibilities seem to shy away from confronting the vulgar without detergent. Tolaas has even crafted a compliment of vials containing bespoke smells never smelt before to break in case of an event that one wants to create an indelible memory for. It’s assuredly a good thing that we must needs be present for the perception that is most immediate and unmitigated to the brain (though whole industries are devoted to building those barriers) and to perform witchcraft, chemistry and biology, unable to elevate ourselves above the miasma that was formerly blamed for all maladies.

pharmacopea

We enjoyed learning of the provenance and prompting of this detailed 1932 medicinal plant map of the United States—bordered by pharmacologically significant plants from around the world—and the ensuing discussion of the evolution and repackaging of the apothecary’s skill and experience as Big Pharma.
As appears in the map’s call-out box, the public lose sight of the contributions of a trained corps of professional to supplement medical science, whose advances cannot be discounted to be sure, at their peril and it was unwise to place too much faith in synthetic chemistry whose mechanisms can sometimes elicit more guesswork and side-effects than we bargain for.  What do you think?  Moreover, and perhaps the graver concern, we do ourselves and the profession by conflating traditional wisdom and folk-remedies with snake-oil and superstition—which stakes a claim to legitimacy because of the challenge in knowing where to draw the line. 

discharge

Studying the anatomy of the electric eel informed Alessandro Volta’s first synthetic battery and over two centuries later, the creature (Electophorus electricus, and technically a kind of knifefish) is still contributing to scientific innovation, as The Atlantic reports (not pictured but drawing off the same idea of scalability), with a Swiss team making soft and pliable energy storage units that act like the highly specialised electricity producing organ. Potentially compatible with our own bodies, some recognise the bionic potential, powering and self-sustaining medical implants and microscopic machinery that our metabolism and internal chemistry can keep charged.

chthonic

Extracting treasure from the Earth is very dirty business—only exacerbated by our insatiable drive to eke out just a bit more profit informed by chemistry.
Humans are slowly coming to terms with the idea that the planet has finite resources, and until it becomes commercially viable to mine asteroids (I’d argue that that time has arrived since it might spare us some of the scars of excavation and render the advantage that scarcity confers meaningless—or at least make it something aspirational) there are quite a few strategically significant elements that are in danger of running out, as illustrated on this period table.  As we learn the consequences of treating our home as if it were inexhaustible, we are also on the verge of realising that our lifestyle (outfitted with electronic components that require certain amounts of these endangered) is not sustainable. It’s especially disappointing to consider we might be sacrificing future spaceships and foregoing genuine technological progress for the sake of baubles and charms whose potion calls for a dash of indium and a pinch of hafnium.

twinkle, twinkle

Via Dark Roasted Blend’s latest edition of Biscotti Bits, we discover that the inspiring flickering flame of a candle and the light it gives becomes something even more poetic and romantic through rigorous chemical analysis, from a battery of experiments conducted in the summer of 2011.
The wick burning through the medium of tallow or wax generates different carbon allotropes (the known arrangements of the element: soot, graphite, and the crystalline form) as the flame rises and heats up to eventually bind with the surrounding air as carbon-dioxide—reclaiming the intermediary by-products, but one short-lived but ongoing episode of the chemical history of a candle—as Michael Faraday lucidly presented to the curious public in an 1860 lecture, couched in the same glittering and poetic language that feeds the fire and our imaginations, sees the creation of millions of tiny particles of diamond ash, destined to be consumed at the peak and hottest part of the flame. It is really amazing what fundamental mysteries are just being solved, and how there’s more questions in those answers. I wonder if the soot of the flame is transmogrified into the more exotic forms of carbon as well—like graphene and bucky-balls, and if the tiny diamonds are winked out of existence if there’s no up or down for the candle, were it burning in the micro-gravity of space.

tincture

Harvard University’s school of art conservation and restoration has amassed a formidable infirmary, medicine cabinet after medicine cabinet used to doctor and resuscitate faded works of art, in the form of a vast and unique collection of ancient and artisanal pigments from around the world. The public can visit this workshop and marvel and the chemistry of colour—an indispensable resource for revitalising damaged masterpieces with their true hues—and learn more about each sample’s provenance, like toxic green and the particular yellow derived from cows fed on an exclusive diet of mango leaves.

unobtainium

Though seemingly a human construct and just an arbitrary but satisfying stopping point, the once toothiness of the Periodic Table of Elements that is no more is a significant subject and the arrangement and ordering of the possible chemical components hang on the non-negotiable properties of physics and nature.
The columns correspond to the valances (shells) of electrons that can “orbit” a given atom of a given heft and proximity is predictive of characteristics and foretold of all the gaps decades prior to their discovery. Even though there was no surprises found in the missing cells, it’s pretty keen to have all that apparently ironed out. Chemistry is not some tin-pot dictator whose managed to complete one more row of medals and ribbons of some uniform that he is wont to prance about in but rather this—guardedly, could represent all normal matter in the Universe, with no new additions to follow. Structurally, we cannot expect to find anything bigger as the mobil would not have a state of equilibrium, although most of the heavier elements with more than one hundred protons exist only in the laboratory as a smattering of atoms that quickly decay.  Normal, experiential matter however does just comprise some fifteen percent of what’s out there with the overwhelming surplus of the Cosmos made of hypothetical Dark Matter, which only shows itself in its gravitation wake and could be made out of a completely different set of elements.

hermes trismegistos or copernican revolution

I was familiar enough, I thought, with legendary the Prague (Praha) of the late Renaissance and dormitories and laboratories constructed on the castle grounds for research into alchemy and the esoteric arts, but failed to appreciate that this commission and many of the scattered artefacts, both tangible and in the realm of ideas that challenge received knowledge, have a singular provenance thanks to the curiosity of one practitioner and patron, Hapsburg Emperor Rudolf II.

Weary of the overtly hostile political ambitions of the his traditional capital of Vienna (Wien) and having no truck with neither the Protestants nearer to home nor the Counter-Reformation of his Spanish cousins, Rudolf chose to move his court to the ancient city—considered rather isolated from the rest of the Empire due to the recent and relatively successful Hussite rebellion against papal authority. There, collecting wonders and academics, Rudolf was able to carry on as a mad scientist in peace with the aims of ending factionalism in faith through miraculous demonstrations.

Not only did the discipline of chemistry develop out of the magicians’ trial and error—the aim was not to transmute base metal into gold but because gold did not rust, it was considered incorruptible and thus immortal—but also many mystic writings, including the undeciphered oddity known as the Voynich manuscript, were gathered together, studied in view of endless galleries of curio-cabinets.
These Wunderkammern were of course a treat to show-off to visiting dignitaries and an unparallelled collection of liminal objects which blurred the divide between Nature and artifice that also made a statement of the might of the Emperor—especially during a time of messy war with the Turks and the Finns—but primarily, there in the study-hall, were catchments of the art of memory and imagination. Polymath Pierre Hérgony himself was also a compatriot. University education or the time involved little research or experimentation and certainly did not invite unorthodox thought. There is quite a bit to unpack here and sadly the catalogue was broken up, lost, destroyed or hidden away—the perpetual motion machines, grimoires, unicorn horns and other unverified relics, so it is hard to declare Rudolf’s greatest legacy, but among the top contenders would certainly be the Emperor’s engagement with astronomers Tycho Brahe and Nicholas Copernicus, who during their tenure at court moved the centre of the Universe from Earth to the Sun and finally to a point in the void, a focus, around which the worlds revolved.

libidinous or better living through chemistry

The magnanimous souls of the pharmaceutical industry have managed to create another product to fulfil a need that didn’t exist—sometimes I wonder how close marketing and rampant capitalism is to the ´pataphysical—this time, in pill-form, a drug whose litany of side-effects include stimulating a woman’s libido. It’s bad enough that we’re willing to cede our trust and confidence so lightly to institutions that deserve far more scrutiny, but what really galls me is that medical science considers the possibility of a woman not being a vamp at all times a greater “unmet need” than say a male version of the birth-control pill or something that might knock testosterone levels down a few notches.

print-lab

Reports are emerging that organic chemists from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have collaborated with engineers to produce their discipline’s own version of the 3D printer, which can transcribe small molecules and building-blocks for study and discovery. An established line of known chemicals can of course be synthesised in laboratories but usually at a great cost and with limited access which makes experimentation and distributed research prohibitively expense.

Most of such facilities are under contract to the pharmaceutical industry and it’s much more profitable for a lab to try to tease out an extension on some proprietary drug, a patent-medicine, that to devote time and effort on, say, an exotic jungle plant’s interesting, intriguing but uncertain anti-microbial properties brought to them by some unknown and uncredentialed scientist. Perhaps now, instead of supplicating and then queueing up—or trying to gather more samples from the field—researchers could just isolate the target compound, its structure and composition, and submit a print request to have batch of the chemical custom-made, which could be dispatched to several test centres or research facilities at one time. Democratising the studies, the important concepts of peer-review and vetting could perhaps become to mean teamwork, discovering novel and safe treatments and other substances (better culinary preservatives, glues, inks, textiles, etc.) more efficiently.

rayon x ou petites curies

A brilliant dispatch from Mental Floss relates the story of Marie Curies' inspired frustration and determination not to sit idly by as the horrors of WWI intruded into her homeland.

Dissatisfied with mere fidutiary contributions and recognising that the trench warfare was rough-shod and merciless, Curie and her daughter undertook a harrowing journey—without hesitation—retrieving a ingot of Radium that she had isolated from a bank safe deposit-box in Bordeaux and invented the science of radiology, radiography and disciplines of nuclear medicine (which no one could question owing to its novelty), learnt to drive an ambulance and single-handedly triage field hospitals (the recruiting and training of medics came later) equipped with x-ray equipment to help surgeons better assess and treat battle-damage and provide some heavy-handed sterilisation. Eventually succumbing to her own life-saving techniques, I imagine that the ingenious scientist was all too aware of the risk in her methods, which make the artefacts (her laboratory equipment, notebooks and clothing that are still radioactive), while pushing for progress in the techniques, a legacy of danger, imagination and outright bravery.

forked-tongue or double-helix

Researchers at the University of Washington have announced that the genetic coding, deciphered on an elementary level first in the 1960s, of DNA contains a second cryptic language that governs the activation and deactivation of genes in addition to the instructions for expressing proteins.

The hidden directions indicate that by its vocabulary DNA may be responsible for what's understood as aging and disease, more so than time and decay. Perhaps such a dual function should not come as something unexpected, though unplumbed, necessarily, but it does, I believe, really demonstrate the folly of genetically modified foodstuffs in learning that there is something proactive as well as reactive to body chemistry. We are certainly not programmed for sabotage or self-destruction, I think, our bodies are rather, fortunately smarter than ourselves. Do you think such a palimpsest of language is prone to misinterpretation, since the coding of chemistry and biology might not be as straightforward or verbose as our systems of constructed communications and sub-routines?

cornucopian or QED

Though many clever and novel ideas are later disproven or shown to have specious connections—not unlike spontaneous generation, the theory of humours, leechcraft or alchemy but not plate tectonics, natural selection, the heliocentric solar system, and so on—a hypothesis, regardless of how intriguing or alluring it sounds at first, is something that is to be tested and ought to be taken as such while the verdict is still out. The verdict is still out on a lot of things. Boing Boing’s science correspondent understands the scientific method very well and warns readers to proceed with rigour and caution when entertaining this brief from Discovery magazine regarding a supposition from the University of Copenhagen that environmental pollution, specifically elevated carbon-dioxide levels, may be contributing to the marked increase in the incidence of obesity.

The argument, though untested, holds that breathing an excess of carbon-dioxide turns the blood slightly more acidic and throws off the chemistry of the body and the mind, triggering people to feel hungry more often and be less inclined to sleep properly. This notion has sparked some rather strident opinions on both sides, which underscores, I think, the importance of scientific thoroughness, especially when it has become all too common for pharmaceutical interests, environmental activists, nutritionists and the agricultural lobby to skew results in their favour, and basically setting up competent authorities to act as their pushers. A cornucopian, by the way, who could be characterized either as a denier or an optimist depending on one’s leanings, describes a futurist who believes, either through attrition or innovation, that mankind will not run out of resources any time soon. Traditional wisdom is not necessarily bad science or pseudo-science, but when false connections take root, it can be very hard to disabuse people of those beliefs, especially with a strong marketing force behind them. The idea of the slight change in the pH levels of one’s blood could contribute to obesity (it seems that the whole glass-of-wine-a-day argument and the fitness of French people approached this hypothesis from the other side, and the idea about the acidic of blood making someone prone or immune to disease reminds me of the mysterious survivors of the alien outbreak in the Andromeda Strain, whose blood was too acid to allow the virus to take hold) possibly simplifies the condition, since it seems far more likely that the afore-mentioned peddlers and pushers and a sedentary lifestyle are the causes, and it doesn’t seem quite right to entangle care for the environment with personal health or vanity, though that may prove most effective for bettering both.

pharmacokinetics or better living through chemistry

Before repairing to bashing the industrial standards of Asian maunfacturers for toothpaste with high lead-content, and eliding over our own thiftiness for going with the lowest bidder in the first place, the Western world makes and has made for decades quite enough poisonous products all on its own.  One piece that rather made my skin crawl and left me shuddering for the checkout girl where H and I went shopping just a little bit earlier concerned studies showing that Bisphenol A leeches from thermal-receipt paper through the skin and into the body just from casual handling.  It's nearly as devastating as the formaldehyde that leaks out of new furniture and carpeting.

Though Bisphenol A (BPA) has been synthesized since the 1930s, more familar as the acetone in finger-nail polish remover and paint-thinner--what a compliment to one's home chemistry set--it has never been proven safe, and the substance, ubiquitous and seemingly innocent, sparks the occasional uproar, like not practicing microwave cookery in microwave-safe plastic containers, PVC piping, and because it mimicks estrogen and acts as a replacement for the hormone, it has been attributed to a wide range of disorders that could  seem to have no other explanation, like frequency of breast cancer, premature birth, liver disfunction and even obseity and attention deficiency.  Even places, like the European Union and Canada, that have enacted restrictions against environmental BPA probably are not looking to their cash registers yet.  In Germany, one's receipts are forced on one or left to gather as trash at the end of the shopping conveyor belt, but there was a trend that's gone away not to handle money, at least not to put change in the customer's hand but offer it up on such a tray.  Surely the thermal printer and point-of-sale cartels could be convinced to employ safer means.  Next time, everyone should refuse a printed receipt, when it's not needed, and tell the cashier exactly why.