Holidays Mean Cookies, Santa, and Science

     As the holidays draw near an article in the Denver Post by Nickelodeon, lays out 2016's must have gifts for young scientists. Nickelodeon is inspiring the next generation of problem solvers with their hit shows like Blaze and Monster Machines. Three STEM gifts/activities are outlined in the article, including how to make a sled out of popsicles sticks, creating a moving ice rink out of magnets, and the classic building a gingerbread house. The examples given are engineering and physics based, but deep within the page is a link to Modern Parents Messy Kids. Here the chemistry can be found.

     Modern Parents Messy Kids outlines a wide variety of STEM gifts for a multitude of ages. There is everything from computer coding to engineering to math and logic games. Chemistry and Life Science even has its own section. One chemistry themed gift is "Smartlab Toys Secret Formula Lab". It comes with test tubes that connect together, with 40 experiments. All you need is a few supplies found in the kitchen. It includes all the essentials: pH paper, phenol red, and calcium chloride. The list also includes gifts like the "Mind Blowing Science kit" equipped with a guide with secrets of the science for parents and "The Everything Kid's Science Experiment Book", where kids can boil ice, float water and so much more. This holiday season for the young and the old, inspire those around you and let chemistry be apart of your festivities.

Natural Products Chemistry Holds the Answer to the Looming Antibiotic Crisis

This article was about how drugs of the future might actually come from botanical treatments dismissed by Western medicine. Dr. Quave, an ethnobotanist from Emory University is using her efforts to find plants with the power to heal and prevent a medical apocalypse. She is a leader in the field of ethnobotany and gathers hundreds of therapeutic plants and performs a chemical analysis on them back at Emory University. She also has spent time reading about medicinal plants used by the Native Americans and has conducted fieldwork regarding medicinal plants in Peru, rural Italy, Sicily, Albania, and Kosovo.                                                                                                                                

This is important because the widespread emergence of resistant bacteria have claimed around 700,000 lives a year globally. Experts predict that by the year 2050, they will kill 10 million people annually, which is one person every three seconds. Simon Gibbons, a medicinal phytochemist from University College London states "Nature is a superchemist" and "The kind of evolution that happens in living things gives rise to unusual chemistry that is not straightforward to synthesize."This is because organic chemists have been unable to emulate the ingenuity and complexity of organic compounds produced from eons of evolution. Cedric Pearce, the chief executive of the fungi-based drug development company Mycosynthetix states "Nature creates extremely effective but extraordinarily complex structures that a chemist would look at and say now why would I ever think to design that?"  

The world's cabinet of useful antibiotics is almost empty and scientists are rushing to discover new antibiotics by searching natural resources.Some researchers are trying to mine the untapped potential of soil bacteria, devising new kinds of growth chambers that might allow unstudied species to thrive in the lab. Others are genetically engineering microbes to produce little-known compounds that could be useful for making drugs. Still others are scavenging the native antibiotics in ocean life, fungi and insects. As of 2003, at least 25% of all medicine was derived from plants; but only a fraction of the 50,000 known medicinal plants used globally have been studied in the lab.

It was in southern Italy where Dr. Quave discovered that they use Elmleaf Blackberry to treat boils and abscesses. She took samples of the blackberries back to her lab at Emory University where they were dried, grinded to a powder, and extracted with various organic solvents. Then, different combinations of the blackberry powder was added to brothy wells of MRSA. The powder did not kill the MRSA, but prevented it from forming biofilms, which allows MRSA to adhere to living tissues and medical devices. The powder sidestepped the bacteria's resistance by interrupting its ability to communicate to other bacteria, or Quorum Sensing. It is when bacteria communicate and team up when they start spewing toxins and exchange genes for antibiotic resistance. They then form a thick cellular wall that is impenetrable to many drugs. A drug that could disrupt a bacteria's quorum sensing can sidestep resistance and there would be weaker evolutionary pressure to develop resistance in the first place.

Dr. Quave's samples being freeze-dried by a lyophilizer

   

Brazilian Peppertree Branch

                                                    

Magic Leap: The Cyberpunk Wonderland of Tomorrow

     Last week I came upon an article on Forbes which detailed a "secretive" 4.5 billion dollar tech startup in South Florida, and the experience of the author in taking their groundbreaking technology for a test drive. Most of us have been exposed to "groundbreaking" advancements in computer interfaces before. Google Glass seems like a logical next step from the smartphones we all carry, but it doesn't appear to be trying to be anything more than a smartphone you wear on your head. Virtual reality headsets have also come a long way, but what's the point of total immersion in an artificial world if you're still confined to your living room, still worried about bumping your knee on the coffee table? According to the author of the article, David Ewalt, Magic Leap is able to render anything, from any angle, right in front of you. in order to curb my own tendency for exaggeration, I'll simply quote the article:

"The hottest ticket in tech is an invitation to a banal South Florida business park, indistinguishable on the outside from countless other office buildings that dot America’s suburban landscape. Inside, it’s a whole different story. A different reality, in fact. Humanoid robots walk down the halls, and green reptilian monsters hang out in the lounge. Cartoon fairies turn the lights on and off. War machines, 75 feet tall, patrol the parking lot.

Even the office equipment does the impossible. The high-definition television hanging on the wall seems perfectly normal. Until it vanishes. A moment later it reappears in the middle of the room. Incredibly, it is now levitating in midair. Get as close as you’d like, check it out from different angles. It’s 80 inches diagonal, tuned to ESPN–and there is nothing holding it up."

"For that matter, they can make anything appear, like directions to your next meeting, drawn in bright yellow arrows along the roads of your town. You’ll be able to see what that new couch you’re thinking of buying looks like in your living room, from every conceivable angle, under every lighting condition, without leaving your home. Even the least mechanically inclined will be able to repair their automobiles, with an interactive program highlighting exactly which part needs to be replaced and alerting you if you’re doing it wrong. And Magic Leap is positioned to profit from every interaction: not just from the hardware and software it will sell but also, one imagines, from the torrent of data it could collect, analyze–and resell."

This is where we get to the aspect of this device that I find so compelling: it's not just a disruption technology, its the greatest disruption technology I think anyone has ever heard of. We saw how how Netflix led to declines in cable service, and how Uber basically made cab drivers an obsolete profession, but this is a device that's going to make televisions obsolete, if only it can be made available to the average consumer. 

Ocean Plastic Emits Chemical that Tricks Seabirds into Eating Trash

More than 5.3 million tons of plastic waste is dumped into the ocean every year. Some estimates put the amount as high as 12.7 million metric tons. In the article “There’s a StinkyReason Seabirds Eat Plastic” a recent study, published in Science Advances examines the reasons why plastic smells like food to seabirds. "Animals usually have a reason for the decisions they make," says lead author Matthew Savoca, who performed the study as a graduate student at UC Davis. "If we want to truly understand why animals are eating plastic in the ocean, we have to think about how animals find food." In the study they discovered that plastic left in the ocean has a trace of the compound dimethyl sulfide, also known as DMS. Algae that coat the plastic when it sits in the water cause DMS to be released producing a rotten cabbage like odor, which attracts the birds. The birds mistake the plastic for food and ingest it readily.

In the study scientists loaded pellets of three common types of plastic, high-density polyethylene, low-density polyethylene and polypropylene into mesh bags and tied the bags to a buoy in the ocean off the coast of California. After three weeks the bags were collected and a chemical analyzer revealed that the plastic did indeed smell of DMS. The study also explains that species with tubenoses like petrels and albatrosses are more prone to eating plastic than other birds because they follow their noses carefully to find food. This makes them six times more likely to ingest plastic as other birds. A 2015 study estimated that 90% of seabirds eat plastic. This causes damage to their internal organs and can take up valuable space inside their stomach.

Taming Poison Ivy's Itch.

It is no secret that direct contact with poison ivy causes an uncomfortable agonizing itch. How this happens is still not clearly defined. As reported in ACS News online, Sven-Eric Jordt of Duke university pinpointed a molecular pathway that helps transmit an itch signal through nerve cells by exposing mice to poison ivy’s oily allergen urushiol. Two commonly prescribed drugs to fight the poison ivy itch are antihistamines and corticosteroids. Unfortunately antihistamines seem to not work and although corticosteroids fight inflammation they are ineffective against itch.  Jordt looked for genes that were transcribed at higher levels in mice whose skin was brushed with urushiol compounds compared to non-exposed mice. 

As expected several genes associated with inflammation were up regulated in the infected mice, but Jordt focused on one particular gene that codes for the protein interleukin-33, associated with itchy skin. When the exposed mice were given antibodies against IL-33, the mice slowed their scratching significantly. When exposed mice were given antibodies against IL-33’s receptor, ST2, which is located on sensory neurons that connect to the animals’ skin, also significantly reduced itching.  Researchers suspected a link such as this one but did not know the specifics. Even though a molecular pathway for itch is complicated, these systems will share features important for future drug design. Jordt’s team hopes to work with clinicians to see if they can detect IL-33 in humans with poison ivy.

Bio batteries

Many things that we own run on batteries. Your phone, computer, and car all need a battery. Batteries that we have now are ridig, bulky, can overheat, and leak.  Researchers from the Renselaer Polytechnic Institute are research bio batteries. These new batteries uses bodily fluids such as blood, sweat, and even urine. So they could be inserted under the skin without any discomfort. They would continue to work as long as you keep eating. The batteries are thin like paper because they are much like paper.

They are 90% paper and 10% carbon nanotubes. The carbon nanotubes are what give it its conductive abilities. Advantages are that the battery is thin, light weight and can be cut into different shapes. When a few of them are bundled together they can be used to power medical implants. They can resist low temperatures and high temperatures up to 300 degrees Farhenheit. As well as a battery it can act as a high energy capacitor. I would assume that people would become concerned with how far the application would be taken by the commercial market if the battery can become strong enough to power something like a cell phone. That could lead to people start having a phone as part of there body which sounds cool but also dangerous at the same time
The link to the article is below
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/everyday-tech/blood-battery.htm