Posts Tagged chemistry

How to get sober quicker Aimee Whitcroft Mar 02

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This is great news for all of us drinkers.  And, frankly, if I was just a little better at actual chemistry, how I’d make my first couple of fortunes*

And now I have the song ‘Tiny Bubbles‘ stuck, unfortunately, in my head. (When I first heard it, though, it was an Aero jingle.  Possibly)

scotch

So yes.  To give it to you simply, before going into all that explanation stuff, it’s very simple – loading more dissolved oxygen into alcohol apparently removes some of the side-effects of drinking it.  But more on those details later.

Firstly, a brief lesson in how the body processes alcohol.  Metabolically, that is, not  in the sense of ‘it makes you do silly things and lose control over your joints’.

So…Shortly after the imbibing thereof, alcohol gets almost completely absorbed into your bloodstream.  By shortly,  I mean that about 30-90 min after you’ve had that drink, its goodness has peaked in your blood.  And then needs to be got rid of.  It is, after all, a toxin.

In order to do this, a few different enzymes are needed (see diagram below).  They include ADH (alcohol dehydrogenase), ALDH (aldehyde dehydrogenase) and MEOS (microsomal ethanol oxidising system).  To summarise, they are involved in oxidation of alcohol and the ensuing compounds – this whole process is the primary one used to detoxify alcohol, though not the only one.

alcohol oxidation

Particularly scary, the intermediate phase of the breakdown process, acetaldehyde, causes DNA damage***.  Not, as I’m sure you agree, a good thing.

But moving along.  As you may have guess from the liberal use of words beginning with ‘ox-’, oxygen is of primary importance in this process.  And, in fact, the more oxygen there is around, the faster the process is able to happen.  Also, it would appear to produce ‘major elevations’ in enzymes which are involved in protecting against alcoholic liver damage.  Another good thing (my, but aren’t we racking them up).

So, where does all this oxygen come from?  Well, from breathing, and also through our skin and gut.  Interestingly, the liver gets the vast majority of its oxygen from the gut directly.  To quote the paper:

Oxygen for ethanol oxidation is supplied through breathing, the stomach, and the skin. Gastroenteric oxygen intake (via the stomach) is more intensive than breathing and supplies oxygen to muscle cells and can be involved in regenerative processes. Additionally, oxygen-enriched water, supplied to the stomach, affects the oxygenation of portal blood. Breathing increases the oxygen content in the liver by 8%, while oxygen absorbed through the stomach can increase it by 43% (Forth and Adam, 2001). (My emphasis)

On to the experiment.  In essence, they fed alcoholic beverages (with the prior, written consent of their subjects, although why this would be necessary I don’t know.  Free drinks!) containing different amounts of dissolved oxygen to their test subjects.  Slash new best friends.  And they noticed that it took significantly less time for the BAC (blood alcohol concentration) to drop in people fed higher-oxygen drinks.  Further, looking at the detailed results (available in the paper), it would appear that this oxygen affects the bits where the alcohol is metabolised/eliminated, not absorbed.

And so, after all this, I shall answer the question hovering on your lips; ‘but what does this actually mean?’

Well, it means that you can still get happily tipsy and/or drunk.  But, and this is wonderful, you’ll sober up faster, which is good news for traffic- and other drinking-related accidents.  Also, hopefully it might mean that less DNA damage takes place.

Hooray!

On a separate, but linked note:  DNA damage is not, it would seem, permanent nor even particularly difficult to fix (in some cases, at least).  We all sustain and accrue DNA damage as we go through our lives, and this damage is of course implicated in ageing and age-related diseases.  But a field of study called nutrigenomics looks at how our diets interact with our genotypes at that level.  And some of the work done (for example by Dr Michael Fenech) is suggesting that simply feeding our bodies the correct micronutrients can go a long way towards fixing this damage.  Of course it’s different for each individual, before you all go charging off to buy millions of supplements.

* Note: anyone who copies my idea automatically accepts me as partner to the enterprise.  Also, I know bus. strat/marketing/research etc.  I’d be perfect…

** Diagram, and knowledge of DNA damage, happily from Dr Michael Fenech (with diagram doubly referenced as Boffetta and Hashibe Lancet 2006 and Morimoto et al 1993).

Reference:

In-hwan Baek, Byung-yo Lee, and Kwang-il Kwon (2010). Influence of Dissolved Oxygen Concentration on the Pharmacokinetics of Alcohol in Humans
Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research : 10.1111/j.1530-0277.2010.01155.x

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

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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)”

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