The buzzwords of this era is definitely “green”. It’s hip and popular, everyone wants to save the world (or at least themselves) from the doom of global warming. One of the biggest obstacles is the massive use of fossil fuels, especially on personal transport (cars/motorcycles etc). Here’s the thing though! There is a perfectly clean fuel that we have in abundance (unlike many of the other clean proposals), hydrogen!

You may think it’s like the electric or solar car, a nice idea but ultimately a car that noone really uses (although that’s certainly changing for those two), but the fact of the matter is that these cars are in use around the world. In fact, right here where i live now, Reykjavík (Iceland), there are buses driving around that are run on hydrogen, and i went whale watching the other day on a boat that can also use hydrogen.

While there are many problems associated with hydrogen cars, one of the main problems is that it takes energy to create hydrogen, because we mostly get it by separating the Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms in the water (H20) molecule. And where does this energy come from? You guessed it, fossil fuels that pollute. An exception to the rule might be a country like Iceland where we actually get our energy almost exclusively from hydro-power (huge dams essentially) which is a clean and renewable source of energy, but for the rest of the world this is not the case.

That’s why i was happy to read a story about researchers from Penn state and Purdue claiming to have found a method of extracting hydrogen without leaving a carbon-footprint. Using a few different nanotubes (even more buzzwords!) and energy from the sun, they’ve been able to split water into it’s two basic atoms, and extracting the hydrogen for later use, without releasing any Carbon Dioxide. If you’re interested in the finer details of the process check out the press-release i linked at the start of this paragraph, I’m afraid i’m not much of a chemist or nano-guy, so i won’t recite the details too much.

Although the efficiency of the device is extremely low in this first try (0.3% of the energy from the sun gets translated to electric energy), they are apparently very easy and cheap to make and last for a long time. I must admit though that I’m not sure what the advantage of using this method is, as opposed to just using a traditional solar-panel with MUCH higher electricity and then using that energy to separate the molecule. But like i said before, I’m not much of a chemist.

Whatever the deal is, i personally have high hopes for hydrogen as an energy source. There are many sources around like biofuel, ethanol etc. But these are all resource that are limited, while hydrogen is by far the most common element in the universe, so advances in it’s extraction are always good news for me.

Once again it is news from MIT (it would appear that their extravagant tuition fees are paying off), this time around carbon nanotubes (buzzwords ahoy!) engineered to detect deadly gases such as sarin, mustard gas and VX nerve agents.

Sarin is probably best known for the terrorist attack on the subway system in Tokyo back in the mid 90’s, and it can kill at very low concentrations, so very sensitive detectors are needed if they are to be effective, and it would appear that MIT has delivered. They use a device to rapidly separate the different gases present in the air, before feeding it through the nano-tubes. The gas molecules can then attach themselves to the nanotubes, which changes the way electricity flows through them, thus creating a way to detect specific gases in the air (different molecules will effect the electrical-resistivity of the nanotubes differently).

They had to go one step further though, because as you might imagine, this would pretty much be a one-shot-wonder if the molecules just stayed attached to the nanotubes, needing a fresh batch for every measurement. So they coated the nanotubes with amine type molecules which drastically reduces the time they are attached to the them, releasing the gas molecules within milliseconds. This, coupled with the fact that it only requires 0.0003 Watts to operate, means that you essentially have a continuous detector of deadly gases, that can basically run forever on a basic battery. Not too shabby.

Hey guys, if you read my original post from a few days ago about a breakthrough in how to take fingerprints, you’ll remember that i found a site claiming to do the same thing (seemingly anyway). Well i contacted the researcher involved, and he was kind enough to answer the questions i had, clearing up everything.

Just a quick recap of the original story to start with. They have basically found out that a fingerprint corrodes metal, etching into it the fingerprint itself, and devised a way to image the fingerprint despite the fact that the original fingerprint residue had been completely removed. This is massively useful in cases where for example there might be a fingerprint on a used bullet casing, where the original fingerprint would have been destroyed by the heat of firing the bullet. Only problem was, doing some research for the post, i found other research groups in the UK that seemingly had already done this , raising some questions.

Well i got in contact with the researcher from the (new) study, Dr. John W. Bond, and he answered me promptly and concisely. Turns out, the other group had mainly been working on taking the fingerprint with the fingerprint residue still present, and in their latest paper, they also said they had been able to measure it despite having wiped it down with a tissue. In the case of Dr. Bond’s method however, they thoroughly cleaned their casing using hot soapy water, getting rid of any residue, and were still able to measure a fingerprint. In addition to that (as we predicted) it is also much cheaper then the other method. He did add though that as their results hinge completely on how much the casings (or any other metals) were corroded, they are less consistent then the method used by Swansea.

So, there you have it! Big thanks to Dr. Bond for taking the time to clarify everything, and lets hope that their predictions of many cold cases being reopened due to this new technique holds true.

I’m always a big fan of stories that show science being used in real world examples that concern us all, so a newspiece on how researchers have found a new method of uncovering fingerprints on used bullet casings, is obviously very exciting to me.

Using fingerprints to identify people is clearly nothing new, according to wikipedia, even back in the 9th century it was used as a means of identification on loan agreements, although they were not used as a forensic tool until the late 19th century. But the various methods of extracting said fingerprints have been steadily improving through the years, and now there is one more for the CSI toolbox.

Researchers over at the University of Leicester, have been working with the Northamptonshire police department to create a new method to extract fingerprints from bullet casings that have already been fired. Any trace of an original fingerprint is usually destroyed when a bullet is fired, due to the extreme heat created, but what these guys did, was find out that the fingerprint corrodes the metal casing, and leaves a fingerprint etched into the metal, even after the original fingerprint has been obliterated by the heat.

The actual procedure of getting the fingerprint sounds quite simple. They apply an electric charge to the metal (bullet casing, or any metal really) that is coated in a very fine powder that can conduct electricity. The powder is then attracted to the etchings left by the criminals fingers, thus giving a fingerprint for them to test. So it sounds like it won’t require any crazy expensive equipment to work, so hopefully policemen can start putting it to good work without too much hassle.

Original press release.

Late addition:

I was done writing this article when i came across this webpage from Swansea University, which seems to suggest that this is not exactly a new concept. They even have pretty pictures and 3D visualizations of it all there (the picture in this article is from that experiment). From what i can tell though (and i may well be wrong), the method they are using at Swansea uses something called a Scanning Kelvin Probe, which appears to require much more expensive equipment then the method from the Leicester group do. So maybe THAT is the breakthrough, although that is not how i first interpreted their press-release.

I’m going to contact the guy that wrote this article (the original one i wrote about that is) and see what he has to say, so there might be a followup post in the next few days.

Alright, just a quick post here, i came across this video yesterday and thought it was a really cool concept

I was hoping the website they were advertising was actually exciting and had more similar videos, explaining physical concepts in an innovative way, sadly i was mistaken and the website seems like a boring front for applying for research grants and searching for Post-doc positions.

Scientists from the Department of Energy’s lab at Argonne, have devised a way to have a gas-cloud of molecules align itself in the same way (press release here). This is very significant as it allows scientists to decipher the structure of said molecules without having to crystallize them.

You see, the major way to figure out the structure of molecules and such, is by a technique called x-ray diffraction. It basically shoots in a very powerful x-ray beam (from a source called a synchrotron), and causes it to diffract off it, creating a pattern image. You can think of it kind of like shining light at an object and then looking at it’s shadow to figure out what it looks like (a simplification of course, but you get the idea). The problem with this though, is that each atom will diffract (cast a shadow) in a different way depending on how it is aligned, and unless they are all set in a periodic lattice (also called crystal), it is impossible to understand the diffraction picture and gain any information from it (for an example of a periodic lattice check out the picture for this article). So for example while you would be able to do x-ray diffraction on a crystal, you could not perform it on a gas-cloud, as the distance between atoms there is random and they do not align themselves in any periodic way.

Because of this, scientists have had to crystallize proteins and such that they wanted to investigate (in fact x-ray diffraction was heavily used to investigate DNA when it was found, that’s how they found out it was helical), but there is one major problem, many proteins, including many in drug interaction, can’t be crystallized, and that is where this new technique comes in. Using a laser, they claim to be able to align the molecules in a gas in a periodic way so that it can be used in x-ray diffraction. This would obviously be a huge thing as there are so many proteins (in the human body among other places) that have not yet been investigated.

It should be noted though, that they say they have achieved alignment and theoretically shown that it could be used for x-ray diffraction. They have only achieved the laser periodicity, not actually performed x-ray diffraction on it. On a slightly more personal note, i got to witness the x-ray diffraction of a crystallized molecule a few months ago, and frankly it seemed like a huge hassle, they had to keep it on liquid nitrogen, fish out a tiny sample and mount it in front of the beam. In the end, the sample we saw her (the scientist) image ended up having to be discarded because there was some water vapor that had set on the crystal (if i remember correctly), meaning she had to do it all over again. So I’m sure this is something that will be welcomed with open arms in that community.

Ok, so there are some press-releases popping up now from the University of Washington, about a new video game that is making some bold claims (or at least has some bold goals), their have made a video game where us mere mortals are allowed to contort proteins into 3D shapes in hopes of creating something that is of actual use (link to game website).

The game is based on the actual physics of proteins, and the hope is that gamers around the world will embrace it and gain a sixth sense of sorts to building proteins in a good way, in fact, David Baker, one of the biochemists working on the project, says that his 13 year old son is better at the in-game protein bending then he is. So i guess they’re hoping that kids will gain an intuitive understanding of the physics involved and contort the proteins accordingly, utilizing the natural 3D puzzle solving skills that we humans have.

You might think that it’d be easier to just have a computer have a go at brute-forcing it’s way through it (try every permutation and see what works best), well they’ve already tried that and the number of different proteins needed to be tested are ridiculous, according to the article, it would still take centuries to solve even if all the computers in the world worked on it. So this is why they are trying to come up with an innovative way of finding new breakthroughs in medical science.

I tried downloading the game and playing it, and it was fairly easy to get started and work through the introduction part that explains to you the basic tools at your disposal (even worked fine with wine on my Linux computer). I do have serious doubts about the hefty amount of buzzwords used in their press-release though, take for example this line from one of the scientists:

Our ultimate goal is to have ordinary people play the game and eventually be candidates for winning the Nobel Prize.

Plus of course the mention of perhaps curing HIV with it. This is obviously just shrewd PR work, as it is something that makes for quite catchy titles (”Will the next noble prize winner be a 12 year old gamer?”, “Will gaming nerds cure HIV?” etc), but it almost always seems that science press-releases with too many buzz-words are too good to be true.

I really wish i knew more about biology/chemistry so I’d be more qualified to comment on this whole thing (being a physicist myself), as i DO find it to be a very interesting idea, regardless of my distaste for their PR campaign. They claim that very soon they will be holding competitions for people to make proteins that might be of actual use in the medical industry and such, where the top proteins in the competition will actually be produced and tested in petri dishes at Dr. Bakers lab (and given credit if they publish an article on it).

I’m curious though, how they actually intend on picking winners out of possibly thousands of protein structures submitted, as they don’t know beforehand exactly what protein will solve whatever problem it is they have at hand, but that might just be skepticism from someone that does not grasp this field well enough.

Sadly this is not the publication of research already done, but what was being talked about in a presentation at the American Chemical Societies 235 national meeting. Basically what they say is that there could be another “Island of stability” where artificial super-heavy elements could exist.

The period table, as you probably know, consists of all the atoms in the universe, with 92 of them being naturally found, while the rest is created by smashing atoms together, and they are usually very unstable, falling apart within tiny fractions of a second. There are however artificial elements that are stable, and even very practical, such as Americium, which is used in smoke detectors among other things.

As you can see in this picture below, there is a so called “Island of stability”, a sweet spot if you will, where the atoms will stay stable. They are now predicting that another one of these Islands could exist even further away (a guess in the report says that it might be at around 164 (118 is the biggest atom created so far).

So what does this give us? We have no idea really. At the moment it’s just exciting research, but as you can see with Americium it is possible that these heavy, artificially created elements can be very useful.