Using a modified iPhone and a fluorescing nanoparticle tattoo, researchers at Northeastern University have found a way to monitor chemicals in the blood without drawing blood.
The team begins by injecting a solution containing carefully chosen nanoparticles into the skin. This leaves no visible mark, but the nanoparticles will fluoresce when exposed to a target molecule, such as sodium or glucose. A modified iPhone then tracks changes in the level of fluorescence, which indicates the amount of sodium or glucose present. Clark presented this work at the BioMethods Boston conference at Harvard Medical School last week.
The tattoos were originally designed as a way around the finger-prick bloodletting that is the standard technique for measuring glucose levels in those with diabetes. But Clark says they could be used to track many things besides glucose and sodium, offering a simpler, less painful, and more accurate way for many people to track many important biomarkers.
Sam Kean is blogging the periodic table of elements over at Slate.
Starting today, I'll be posting on a different element each weekday (the blog will run through early August), starting with the racy history of an element we've known about for hundreds of years, antimony, and ending on an element we've only just discovered, the provisionally named ununseptium. I'll be covering many topics-explaining how the table works, relaying stories both funny and tragic, and analyzing current events through the lens of the table and its elements. Above all, I hope to convey the unexpected joys of the most diverse and colorful tool in all of science.
If you like that, Kean has written a whole book on the topic.
Frito-Lay wants to change the shape of the salt they put on their potato chips to increase the surface area exposed to taste buds and therefore decrease the amount of salt needed on each chip.
"Early on in our research, it became apparent that the majority of salt on a snack doesn't even have time to dissolve in your saliva because you swallow it so rapidly," explained Mehmood Khan, senior vice president and chief scientific officer and a former Mayo Clinic endocrinologist. A Wall Street Journal story later reported only about 20 percent of the salt on a chip dissolves on the tongue, and the remaining 80 percent is swallowed without contributing to taste.
I'm confused as to why "an understanding of crystal chemistry" is necessary. Why couldn't they just crush/grind the salt into a fine powder instead? Are the cubic crystals still too big even when crushed?
Electrolyzed water (salt water that has been run through an electrolytic process) is gaining acceptance in the US as a replacement for many cleaning agents.
At the Sheraton Delfina in Santa Monica, some hotel workers are calling it el liquido milagroso -- the miracle liquid. That's as good a name as any for a substance that scientists say is powerful enough to kill anthrax spores without harming people or the environment.
A food science professor says that electrolyzed water is "10 times more effective than bleach in killing bacteria" and it's safe to drink. (Although maybe it would kill all the bacteria in your stomach?) But beware the phony health claims.
The Periodic Table of Videos is a collection of videos about all the elements. All your favorites are there...Neon, Rubidium, Lead, Plutonium.
I did embarrassingly bad on this Elements of the Periodic Table quiz. I blanked after naming 17 elements in 2 minutes. Oh, and xylophone is not an element! My physics degree should be retroactively unawarded. (via mouser)
How to unboil an egg:
He explains that when an egg is cooked, the protein molecules unroll themselves, link up and enclose the water molecules. In order to 'uncook' the egg, you need to detach the protein molecules from each other. By adding a product like sodium borohydride, the egg becomes liquid within three hours. For those who want to try it at home, vitamin C also does the trick.
That's from an article on Hervé This, a French chemist whose medium is food.
Natalie Angier's short appreciation of water, which, before you scoff, is a pretty amazing substance despite its ubiquity. "Pulled together by hydrogen bonds, water molecules become mature and stable, able to absorb huge amounts of energy before pulling a radical phase shift and changing from ice to liquid or liquid to gas. As a result, water has surprisingly high boiling and freezing points, and a strikingly generous gap between the two. For a substance with only three atoms, and two of them tiny little hydrogens, Dr. Richmond said, you'd expect water to vaporize into a gas at something like minus 90 degrees Fahrenheit, to freeze a mere 40 degrees below its boiling point, and to show scant inclination to linger in a liquid phase."
By subjecting ordinary water to extremely high pressure and bombarding it with x-rays, scientists at Los Alamos have formed a new hydrogen-oxygen alloy. "Given high enough pressures, even hydrogen will behave as a metal. All the other heavier elements in hydrogen's group of the periodic table are metals."
An account of the discovery of Einsteinium and Fermium, elements 99 and 100 on the periodic table. They were generated by the detonation of Mike, the first hydrogen bomb to be tested.
Philip Stewart has constructed an alternate version of the periodic table of elements in the form of a "chemical galaxy". "The intention is not to replace the familiar table, but to complement it and at the same time to stimulate the imagination and to evoke wonder at the order underlying the universe."
