Drink up! Beer benefits bones… Aimee Whitcroft Feb 08

2 Comments

I can hear the whoops of joy emanating around the world.  Joined, of course, by mine.

beer

For years, we’ve known that a glass or two of the vino has its benefits.  However, I’ve never heard of anything particularly beneficial coming as a result of drinking beer (apart from general joi de vivre, of course).

But now, praise be, this time has come to an end.  Researchers have discovered* that beer is good for bone mineral density, meaning moderate consumption of it could help fight osteoporosis.  Overconsumption, of course, could lead to exactly the kind of falls which break bones…

To explain further.

Beer, the oldest and most widely consumed alcoholic beverage on earth (according to wiki) occurs, for the most part,  when malted barley is fermented.  Sometimes hops (that distinctive bitter taste) or fruit is added.  Sometimes the barley is replaced by wheat (my favourite), maize and rice.  All of these things to be expected from a concoction to which ancient odes have been written, and with which we’ve apparently been playing since something like 9,000BC.

It’s the barley, it turns out, that is particularly beneficial.  Its husk contains large amounts of silicon,of all things.

This silicon is present in the resulting beer orthosilicic acid (OSA).  In fact, it constitutes a large proportion of the dietary silicon intake of us Western folk.  And the American NIH is of the opinion that this OSA stuff may be important for the growth and development of bone and connective tissue.

Happily for us, it appears that the malting process itself has little effect on the amount of OSA in the beer, as malting doesn’t really affect barley husks.  Interestingly, and no one knows why, the malts which have the highest silicon are the pale ones (which have had less roasting).  On the other hand, the darker malts, which have undergone more heat stress and roasting, have less silicon.

And for those of you liking your beer hoppy – even better news!  Hops has oodles of silicon in it – apparently, up to 4 times as much as barley, although of course hops is used in far lower quantities than barley.

To paraphrase, then: for the best bone densities around, drink moderately of beers  made with much of malted barley and hops.  Possibly preferably pale.  Sadly, for those (including me) who love their wheat beers , ales and so forth – while there’s definitely anecdotal evidence about their medicinal** qualities, they’re not quite as good silicon-wise.

Reference:

*Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. UPDATE: Researchblogging tag to be updated once it’s online.

**Truly.  Especially the Paulaner Brauhaus’ weissbier.  My father and I are both willing to attest to this.

Local coverage:

First seen on the NZ Herald website, here.

Living with robots – don’t panic Aimee Whitcroft Feb 05

No Comments

Yes, that was indeed an H2G2* reference.  I sneak ‘em in whenever I can…

asimo

Asimo, by Honda

This is just a short post to point you all in the direction of a marvellous little video put together by the makers of Asimo.  And various cars and bikes over the years.

In it, Honda** talks to a number of very interesting poeple, some of whom work in its robotics division, about the past of robotics, how people think and react to them, the influence of the film industry on such perceptions, and where robotics is headed to in the future.

Lovely stuff, with nice production value (we love PD).

*watch out for upcoming post on the subject

** Incidentally, my first few cars were Hondas of various types, and I absolutely swear by them.  What troopers.

HT: IEEE spectrum, a favourite source of geeky joy

Hydrogels or, how to replace petroleum-based plastics Aimee Whitcroft Feb 04

1 Comment

Well, wonders will never cease.  Not only is water already one of the strangest,and most interesting fluids/substances around, but clever scientists from the University of Tokyo just added another layer of WTFness.

hydrogel small

A hydrogel (with hair). Credit: Nature 463, 339-343 (21 January 2010) | doi:10.1038/nature08693

In essence, they have developed a sort of non-fluid, yet still transparent and flexible, water.  A hydrogel.  That’s flexible.  And transparent.  (That was worth repeating).  I’ve seen a reference on the web to ‘elastic water’ but thought that was pushing it a bit far.

Published in the Jan 21 edition of Nature, the paper outlines how the researchers were able to create a high-water-content hydrogel using only water, a bit of clay, and a pinch of organic components (details below).

‘But why’, I hear you ask.  ‘We already have other plastic materials – they’re called, you know, ‘plastic”, I hear you say.  And that’s the problem – they’re all based on petroleum, which is based on oil, which is an increasingly unsustainable thing on which to be based.  You know, what with the inevitability of world oil supplies beginning to decrease and stuff.

So scientists feel it’s reasonable to start exploring other means of constructing plastic materials.  Plastic in the true sense of the word: flexible and mouldable.  Hydrogels – flexible water-based gels – seem an obvious thing to start looking into (and of course we won’t get into the water debate here).

The recipe for this hydrogel goes something like this:  take some water.  Add about 2-3% by mass of clay.  Mix, and add 0.4% by mass of certain organic components*.  Shake well, at least metaphorically, for 3 minutes or a bit longer.

And voila! The final product is a transparent hydrogel with some very interesting properties.  It’s able to stick together, which means it can easily be built into structures etc.  It also keeps its shape, so any structures it’s used for can be free-standing – all due due to its ‘outstanding mechanical strength’.

It’s able to self-heal when damaged, and preserves biologically active proteins for catalysis (great for setting up reactions involving enzymes).  In fact, it has some interesting applications for building reaction sequences using blocks containing different enzymatic activities.

Hydrogel structures

Hydrogels structures (blue and clear). Hydrogels with and without 0.01% methylene blue (for visibility) were prepared using 3.0% CNS, 0.21% G3-binder and 0.09% ASAP, and cut into small blocks. a, b, A bridge constructed by connecting together seven hydrogel blocks can be suspended horizontally (a) and held vertically (b). Diffusion of methylene blue from one block to the other hardly takes place, probably because of its adhesion to the CNS surfaces. c, d, Pictures of a heart-shaped hydrogel object before (c) and after (d) being immersed for 6 h three times in fresh THF at 20 °C. Credit: Nature 463, 339-343 (21 January 2010) | doi:10.1038/nature08693

Most hydrogels have poor transparency, are brittle and can’t self-heal.  In addition, making them is an involved process of multiple iterations of heating and cooling, agitation using sound, and in situ polymerisation or crosslinking reactions.  Our little hydrogel, however, is the polar opposite.  It’s transparent, flexible, and great for building structures with.  It’s easy to make – All one requires is water, the three ingredients, and mixing at room temperature for a few minutes (as few as 3).  In addition, it’s able to persist in briny or pH-positive/negative (acid or alkaline, folks) conditions, and can, with the addition of a couple more compounds, even be made using salt water itself.

I mean c’mon – it’s even environmentally friendly!  I’d take this hydrogel home to meet the parents, as it were.

In short, this hydrogel is going where no hydrogel has gone before, and kudos goes to Wang et al – great work, guys.

Reference:

Wang Q, Mynar JL, Yoshida M, Lee E, Lee M, Okuro K, Kinbara K, & Aida T (2010). High-water-content mouldable hydrogels by mixing clay and a dendritic molecular binder. Nature, 463 (7279), 339-43 PMID: 20090750

*In their words: “CNSs, a dendritic macromolecule (Gn-binder; n, generation number) and sodium polyacrylate (ASAP)”

ResearchBlogging.org

Stunning science imagery Pt I Aimee Whitcroft Feb 03

1 Comment

Presents for your visual systems today… And we’ll be presenting two different people who’re merging science and visuals in new, and quite effective, ways.

xkcd: Fourier

xkcd: Fourier

I know I have a previous post somewhere (probably on my old blog) about engineering photos as well, but I thought I’d start afresh.

So, first up (because I saw it first), is this fantastic imagery, generated by acoustics engineer Mark Fischer (article here).

Fourier Transform (FT) maths is normally used to analyse sound.  It has its limitations, however: it doesn’t handle more complex sounds very well, often turning elements into noise.

And a perfect example of these kind of complex sounds are the calls of whales and dolphins.  And birds.  So Fischer has begun using another method: wavelets.  This is great – not only does it give a far more accurate and detailed map of the sounds/elements in the calls, but the pictures are perdy.  Seriously.  So perdy, in fact, that he’s able to sell them as art.

Hooray for interdisciplinarianism.

Up next is this.  Again, one of those almost ‘duh’ moments, except you have to be a mathematician, a photograher, and a little bit on the artsy side to have the thought.

Still, it works.  Nikki Graziano overlays graphs and their corresponsing questions onto photographs she’s taken which illustrate the equation/graph in question.  Of course, the cool thing about being a mathematician is that she doesn’t need to draw the graph and then prowl the streets looking for an analogous image – instead, she’s able to take photos and then fit the maths to them.

Interesting stuff.  I continue to be unimpressed that I’m not one of Nature’s mathematicians…

Prove your wordpower Aimee Whitcroft Feb 02

5 Comments

Ah, brevity.  [Insert tedious piece of waffling prose extolling its virtues]

ten

But seriously, I came across a fantastic little site today.  Called the Ten Word Wiki, it is precisely that.  No more than ten words to describe any given topic.

I did some typing, and have given a couple of the topical words for which there were entries…

Creationism

Simple explanation of universe for stupid people who failed science.

Homeopathy

Water with a ‘memory’ that knows what’s best for you.

(the above linked to) Placebo effect

How homeopathy works. You think the pill made you better.

Climate

Rain, rain, wind, snow, sleet, rain but never the sun

Physics

The use of mathematics and experiments to understand the universe.

Maths

Doing fancy clever things with numbers (and also sometimes letters)

(also, for the Brits: England – A place to drink tea and complain about the weather.

And for the Scots: Scotland -  “Weather’s shit. So inhabitants drink whisky, fight and invent everything.”)

Most of the words I typed in weren’t there, as it were, so the site is desperately in need of more stuff, particularly in the sciencey areas.  For example, an explanation for ’science’ is missing – anyone got any ideas?

So…do you want to submit explanations?  Or submit better ones than are already there?  Go for it!

And finally: if you do submit a work/explanation, please leave a comment here saying what it was :)

If I was a running shoe manufacturer, I would be worried… Aimee Whitcroft Jan 28

4 Comments

This is brilliant.  I’ve heard intimations of it on various websites for the last few months, but it’s always good to see a published paper backing it up.

running shoes

In short, it says that running shoes are not actually necessary for runners.  In fact, they may do more to cause damage than to protect.

So, the paper, published in Nature, says something along the following lines:

Man has evolved as a creature capable of running.  For long distances, on often very hard (and by that I mean the opposite of squishy) terrain.  If you don’t believe me, simply look at the runners in, well, large parts of Africa.

People running barefoot generally land one of two ways – either on the front/balls of their feet, or else using a ‘mid-foot strike’ in which both ball and heel land simultaneously.  This allows the complex feat of structural engineering that is the human body to absorb most of the shock of this impact – the moment when, apparently, running can cause the most injury.

However, running shoes change the gait of a runner substantially.  By lifting and cushioning the heel, they elongate a runner’s stride, meaning that the impact of striking is the ground is borne by the runner’s heel. and then ricochets upward.  This, in turn, leads to a huge amount of jarring – some 1.5-3 times the weight of the runner, much of which happens to the lower leg.  This could help account for the impact-related injuries which are experienced by many runners these days, including tibial stress fractures and plantar fasciitis.

(Also, the arches of one’s feet, whose primary purpose is shock absorption, apparently flatten over time.  Everyone who wears heels often will be familiar with this problem.)

In order to come to this determination, the researchers looked at three primary groups of people – those who have always undertaken endurance running using athletic footwear (1), those who grew up running either barefoot or minimally shod but now use running shoes (2), and those who grew up using running shoes but now run barefoot or minimally shod (3).   They also compared two other groups of people – those who have never worn running shoes (4), and those who have grown up habitually wearing them (5).

What they found was this:

Groups 1 and 5 (the habitually heavily shod, as it were) generally hit the ground with their heels, both when running with and without shoes.

Groups 2 and 4 (the originally unshod) generally landed on the balls of their feet in both situations, and occasionally used mid-foot strikes (when shod in group 2, and unshod in group 4)…

barefoot

Credit: Benton et. al.*

“This image compares two Kenyan runners from our study at the moment just prior to foot strike plus representative force traces below. The subject on the left has been shod most of his life and lands on his heel (a rear-foot strike)l, causing an impact transient: a rapid, large collisional force within a few milliseconds of impact (not unlike being hit on the heel with a hammer with a force several times one’s body weight). The subject on the right has never worn shoes and lands on outer the ball of her foot before bringing down the heel (a fore-foot strike). This kind of landing is comfortable without shoes because it avoids any collision. The paper explains why forefoot and some mid-foot strikes avoid collision forces at impact.“

The upshot of all of this, after looking at all the maths and stuff, is this: your body has been designed, through the millenia, to run either barefoot or with just enough of a sole to protect your feet from the glass shards and goodness-knows-what-else that is such a feature of the modern urban landscape.  Wearing running shoes could, in fact, lead to stress injuries.

A caveat, however: for those of who count yourselves as being amongst the habitually-shod, don’t simply throw your shoes away and begin your new, natural regime immediately – you will need some time for your body and gait to readjust to this new (yet very old) way of doing things.  As with all sports, take it slowly.

And, of course, the money you were saving for that very expensive pair of [insert name here]-branded shoes can now be used for something else.  Like sending me a real cocktail, across teh interweb, to say thanks.

For more details, I’d suggest having a look at the paper.  If nothing else, it has plenty of pictures of differently flexed feet and ankles, and maths, for those who’re into that kind of thing…

Reference:

* Lieberman, D., Venkadesan, M., Werbel, W., Daoud, A., D’Andrea, S., Davis, I., Mang’Eni, R., & Pitsiladis, Y. (2010). Foot strike patterns and collision forces in habitually barefoot versus shod runners Nature, 463 (7280), 531-535 DOI: 10.1038/nature08723

ResearchBlogging.org

What would we do when the aliens land? Aimee Whitcroft Jan 27

2 Comments

According to Nature, we’d be in trouble…

radio telescope

I love it when serious publications take a walk into the slightly more whimsical.  Let me clear, here – I firmly believe that there is intelligent life out there.  I also firmly believe the hallmarks of their intelligence are that they haven’t contacted us (in the same way that one does not hang out with a revolting teenager for fun), nor are they currently involved in any activity involving probes, crop circles, or anything else.

Ahem.  Moving on.

So, Nature says that no government actually has any serious plans set in place for what to do should Xr’aHG and his mates come calling.  SETI (whose  SETI@home was the first distributed computing app I ever played with back in university) have the only framework, it would seem, for what do in the case of contact (of the distant kind, not the ‘they’re actually heeeeerrrreeee’ kind).  It suggests caution and restraint.  Of course.

Many believe that the aliens might not necessarily be friendly.  Says the article:

“Palaeobiologist Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge University, UK, warned of the possible consequences of detecting extraterrestrial life. He cited examples of convergent evolution in the Earth’s biological history as evidence that there are a limited number of solutions to sensory and social organizational problems. Alien senses could be similar to human senses, he told participants, and social life elsewhere could be as violent as on Earth, where leaf-cutter ants pillage and plunder, and humans wage war. “If the phone rings,” he says, “don’t pick it up.”"

I’ll admit I’m skeptical, but fair enough.  Certainly it’s something to consider.  And the subject put me in mind of this article, which I read years ago, on much the same subject – although more oriented to the actual visitation thing.

I still tell people how amused, appalled, and yet completely unsurprised I was at the tactics that would be used should someone with different bits pop round for a beer, a light snack, or perhaps the recon for imminent world domination.  Said tactics include having the vehicle in question confiscated and removed as far as possible, on the assumption it’s nuclear powered; and having our visitors handed not one single gift, but instead handcuffed by an FBI agent in a serious biosafety suit and then carted off to a lab to ensure he/she/it doesn’t have anything gross or potentially infectious (my knowledge of microbiology suggests this would be extremely unlikely, but yes).

I’ve no doubt that these tactics would be unlikely to endear us to our visitors.  On the other hand, one assumes they would have checked us out a little before coming to see us, and so would not be overly surprised. Then again, who knows?

Perhaps they’re just biding their time until we’re ready to be a bit more mature about the whole thing…

Postscript: A little box underneath the original PM article talked about a ‘taskforce’ which had been put together comprised of interesting people who’d be assembled in the case of contact, having among their ranks mathematicians, physicists, biologists, linguists, and of course Carl Sagan.  I still wish I could be the exobiologist that gets to say hello (in the nicest, least vivisectionist of ways) to any visitors…

A little bit of fun: how to (mathematically) park your car Aimee Whitcroft Jan 26

6 Comments

One wonders if this doesn’t have IgNobel potential.  Of course, it’s not particularly useful, so I doubt it, but it does have that slightly silly appeal :)

Vauxhall Motors commissioned a University of London researchers by the name of Simon Blackburn to figure out how much space any given car needs to parallel park without ’see-sawing’.

As he says in his paper:

“I want to parallel park, and I’ve found a space. The road is wide, but the space looks narrow. I’m not interested in shuffling back and forth to get into the space: I want to reverse into the space at full lock, and then drive straight forward into the middle of the space to park. How narrow can the space be so that I can do this? This report uses some straightforward geometry to compute the smallest length that the space can be.”

And the final equation, which he came to using some circles and a bit of Pythagorean goodness, looks like this…

parallel parking 2Where:

  • r is the radius of my car’s turning circle (curb to curb)
  • l is my car’s wheelbase, defined as the distance between the centres of the front and rear wheels
  • k is the distance from the centre of my front wheel to the front of my car, and
  • w is the width of the car in front of mine once I’m done parking

parallel parking 3

(npr’s got some good graphics here)

So yes, folks, there you have it!  Of course, much the same effect can be achieved by practice, and various other techniques, but it’s good to know that, given the time, equipment and facility for maths almost no one has while attempting to parallel park, you could be absolutely certain whether that gap was big enough…Happy parking!

Stunning visions of Mars Aimee Whitcroft Jan 26

3 Comments

Humanity is now the proud owner of some 13,000 photos of Mars taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

HiRise polar capMonitoring Seasonal Albedo Patterns on South Polar Residual Cap (ESP_014405_0945)
Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

The photos were taken by the most powerful camera of any on NASA’s spacecraft – the aptly (if dryly) named High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE).  The HiRISE site not only lets you amble through the collection, but also offers wallpapers (for the particularly geeky amongst us) and gives some great detail about each photo, including exactly where (as hosted, amusingly, by Google Maps), and what the local time was…

Of course, for those not as interested in the thought of hours spent wandering the archives, have a look at Wired’s ‘best of’ to see some of the strangest and most beautiful.

And, best of all, NASA wants to hear what you, the public, would like photographed next…

Sperm of a feather clump together Aimee Whitcroft Jan 22

5 Comments

I’m gobsmacked.  And highly amused, as well (it’s the immature part of me, apologies).

deer mouseCredit: Phil Myers (photographer, copyright holder), Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan.  More info here and here.  (I tried to find a picture of sperm in question, but nothing seemed to be (c)-free)

Research published in Nature this week has shown something incredible – sperm may not be the mindless automatons bethought by many of us.

Instead, researchers have found that the sperm of deer mice (which are notoriously slutty) are actually able to differentiate between their siblings (i.e. spermies from the same male) and the sperm from competing, and hence arch-rival males.

And how do these family-focussed sperm then deal with the situation?  Not with insults, no, nor the smashing of the headlights of each others’ cars. After identifying the sperm most genetically related to them, they then clump together, allowing them to swim faster towards the egg than less cooperative/clumped together sperm.  Fascinatingly, it’s not a binary relationship – i.e. sperm from same male vs all other sperm.  Sperm were more likely to, for example, aggregate with sperm from their male’s’sibling than with those from an unrelated male.

The behaviour has clear links to the promiscuity of the species – sperm in the Oldfield mouse (a related monogamous species) aggregated without any preference for relatedness.  So why the difference?  Well, one hypothesis posits that aggregation allows the sperm to swim faster, or navigate obstacles better (the mind boggles) – in largely monogamous species which sperm hang out with which clearly isn’t an issue.  As one might expect, however, in species where the sperm of multiple males is vying for the same egg, it would be far better to give a hand up to sperm which are related to one, as opposed to helping out one’s opponents.

Another hypothesis is that the Peromyscus genus was originally promiscuous and that sperm aggregation arose before the two species (deer and Oldfield mouse) diverged, but the ability to discriminate only developed afterwards.

And it would seem to be a clear function of adaptation through sperm competition.

The mechanism which allows this clumping is simple – whereas human sperm have rounded heads, these sperm actually have hook-shaped heads.

Of course, the scientists are completely mystified as to how the sperm are able to make both the differentiation and follow-up action, but no doubt they are eagerly striving to understand these things (I know I would be).  The closest they’ve got thus far is to suggest that it may be a simple genetic mechanism of some kind (as in the case of similarly selective cooperations seen in some social amoeba).

And: I included the picture below, again of a deer mouse, because I think it’s an hilariously fantastic example of the evil eye…

deer mouse 2Credit: Phil Myers (photographer, copyright holder), Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan.  More info here and here.  (I tried to find a picture of sperm in question, but nothing seemed to be (c)-free)

Reference:
Fisher, H., & Hoekstra, H. (2010). Competition drives cooperation among closely related sperm of deer mice Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature08736


ResearchBlogging.org

« Older Entries