moonbuggy

..and zinc and salt and ammonium nitrate.

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‘Although crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani’s tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that the mayor deserves only a fraction of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the “New York miracle” was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.

The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children’s exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin’s work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

“It is stunning how strong the association is,” Nevin said in an interview. “Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead.”‘

‘[..] Anyway, one year there were these two guys who were taking Chemistry and who did pretty well on all of the quizzes and the midterms and labs, etc., such that going into the final they had a solid A.

These two friends were so confident going into the final that the weekend before finals week (even though the Chem final was on Monday), they decided to go up to UVirginia and party with some friends up there. So they did this and had a great time. However, with their hangovers and everything, they overslept all day Sunday and didn’t make it back to Duke until early monday morning. Rather than taking the final then, what they did was to find Professor Bonk after the final and explain to him why they missed the final. [..]’

Fuel + oxidizer = chemical fun.

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‘A synthetic version of a molecule found in the egg cells of the Northern Leopard frog (Rana pipiens) could provide the world with the first drug treatment for brain tumours.

Known as Amphinase, the molecule recognises the sugary coating found on a tumour cell and binds to its surface before invading the cell and inactivating the RNA it contains, causing the tumour to die.

In new research published in the Journal of Molecular Biology, scientists from the University of Bath (UK) and Alfacell Corporation (USA) describe the first complete analysis of the structural and chemical properties of the molecule.

Although it could potentially be used as a treatment for many forms of cancer, Amphinase offers greatest hope in the treatment of brain tumours, for which complex surgery and chemotherapy are the only current treatments.’

‘Italian scientists have developed a pill that expands in the stomach to make dieters feel full.

They liken the effect to eating a bowl of spaghetti and say the pill can stop hunger for a few hours.

It is made from a hydrogel, which the team developed when trying to make more absorbent nappy linings, and may help in the battle against obesity.

So far it has been tested on 20 people but experts warned bigger trials would be needed to test safety.’

‘The Government has warned people to throw away two brands of Chinese-made toothpaste after it was found to contain a toxic chemical.

Chris Pearce, Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer, said today that two brands of toothpaste, Mr Cool and Excel, were being withdrawn from sale after being found to contain diethylene glycol (DEG).

“However, there could well be other brands that have not yet been identified,” he said.

The chemical, diethylene glycol, is used in antifreeze and as a solvent. The chemical is a central nervous system depressant and potent kidney and liver toxin.

Mr Pearce said no Australian-made toothpaste contained DEG.’

Followup to US warns over Chinese toothpaste.

‘The green blood came as a bit of a shock to Dr. Alana Flexman and her colleagues when they tried to put an arterial line into a patient about to undergo surgery in Vancouver’s St. Paul’s Hospital. [..]

As surgical staff prepared the man for the middle-of-the-night emergency operation, Flexman and a colleague attempted to insert a line into a wrist artery.

Arterial lines are used to monitor blood pressure during an operation; any blood that flows when the line is inserted into the artery should be vivid red, the sign it has been oxygenated in the heart.

But in this case, which occurred in October 2005, it was not.’

‘Developed by a team of researchers at Universiti Malaya (UM) for the past two years, a tablet containing walnut extract has shown potential as a local alternative to Viagra.

One of the researchers, UM Faculty of Medicine Physiology Department lecturer Prof Dr Kim Kah Hwi, said that so far 40 volunteers had tried the tablet and responded positively.

On its efficacy, Prof Kim said the new pill was comparable to Viagra and he claimed that it was safer as well, although a person would have to consume about 3.3kg of walnuts for the same effect as one tablet. [..]

Prof Kim said the active ingredient was arginine, an amino acid that is absorbed into the body and converted into nitric oxide.

“This enlarges blood vessels and enhances blood flow to the penis,” he said, adding that the walnuts were sourced from China because they were cheaper there.’

‘American cell phones can already check e-mail, surf the Internet and store music, but they could have a new set of features in coming years: the Department of Homeland Security wants them to sense biological, chemical and radioactive material.

Putting hazardous material sensors in commercial cell phones has been discussed in scientific circles for years, according to researchers in the field. More recently, the idea gained support among government agencies, and DHS said publicly in May that it wants businesses to start coming up with proposals. [..]

S&T spokesman Christopher Kelly said the theoretical system’s strength would lie in the sheer number of sensors. The cell phone sensors might be less sophisticated than highly advanced ones some developers are fitting into hand-held models, but they would make up for it in what Kelly called “ubiquitous detection.”’

‘A grim-faced George AuClair Jr. wandered his 25-acre patch of desert looking every inch the broken man.

“I’m ashamed of what happened here, but you can’t lie about it,” said the Torres Martinez tribal member. “You have to own up when you do wrong.”

Not far away, bulldozers piled up mountains of junk from AuClair’s illegal dump, a dump so toxic it has been declared a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency. He now faces millions of dollars in fines. [..]

AuClair’s biggest mistake was burning thousands of toxic wooden grape stakes.

“How could we have known grape stakes were treated with arsenic and chromium?” he asked. “There was no sign saying, ‘This is hazardous to your health.’ ”

And he insists his own health wasn’t damaged.

“I lost my hair, but I think that was a thyroid problem,” he said, “and I get headaches, but that could be anything.”‘

‘Brian Conant stood alongside his fellow National Guardsmen during a training session about eight years ago in Hawaii. He was wearing a heavy chemical warfare suit lined with charcoal.

“Any time I expelled gas in the suit, I realized nobody could smell it,” Conant, 48, says. “It was amazing.”

According to the American College of Gastroenterology, 58 million Americans suffer from one or more medical disorders that cause excessive gas. To treat it, doctors usually recommend a change in diet. Sometimes they recommend medication, such as Gas-X or Bean-O, which alters the bacteria that may be causing the foul odor. But with Conant’s invention, the Flatulence Deodorizer, also known as Flat-D, there is an alternative way to limit the embarrassment.

The long, narrow washable pad, lined thinly with charcoal, absorbs chemicals, including hydrogen sulfide, a byproduct of the bacteria that causes odorous gas. The pad, at $12.95, curves with the contour of the body, and one size fits most.’

It seems a bit stupid to be claiming this is an alternative energy source, ’cause thermodynamics dictate you’ll be putting more energy into the system than you can recover from the combustion. But, it’s a neat little trick anyway. 🙂

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‘US officials have warned consumers to avoid using toothpaste made in China after a shipment was found to contain a poisonous chemical used in anti-freeze.

The Food and Drug Administration said it could contain diethylene glycol, which has been blamed for the deaths of at least 50 people in Panama last year.

The brands affected are usually sold at “bargain” retail outlets, the FDA said.

The warning comes amid a series of contamination scandals involving Chinese exports to the Americas.

On Thursday, Nicaraguan health authorities seized 40,000 tubes of Chinese-made toothpaste after they were found to contain diethylene glycol (DEG).

The Dominican Republic, Panama and Costa Rica had already removed thousands of tubes of toothpaste from store shelves. ‘

‘Exposure to pesticides could lead to an increased risk of contracting Parkinson’s disease, a study has found.

Researchers discovered that high levels of exposure increased the risk by 39%, while even low levels raised it by 9%. [..]

The study included more general questions about family health history and tobacco use.

All the replies were then compared to those from a group of people of similar age and sex who had not been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

They revealed that while having a family history of Parkinson’s was the clearest risk factor for developing the disease, exposure to pesticides also gave a clear increase.

People who had been knocked out once were 35% more at risk, while being knocked out on more than one occasion appeared to increase the risk by two-and-a-half times.’

People find themselves attracted to studying chemistry for different reasons.

Sometimes, it starts with nitric acid. 🙂

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‘US scientists have developed “super-oxidised” water which they say speeds up wound healing. [..]

The key ingredient of the water, called Microcyn, are oxychlorine ions – electrically charged molecules which pierce the cell walls of free-living microbes.

The water can only kill cells it can completely surround so human cells are spared because they are tightly bound together in a matrix.

It is made by taking purified water and passing it through a semi-permeable sodium chloride membrane, which produces the oxychlorine ions.

One study showed that patients with advanced foot ulcers who were treated with the water, alongside an antibiotic had an average healing time of 43 days compared with 55 days in those who received standard treatment.’

‘A drug which reduces the desire for marijuana and blocks its effect on the brain has been successfully tested in rats. Scientists say the findings may translate into better therapies for cannabis addiction in humans. [..]

Over a period of three weeks the rats learned to enjoy the effects of synthetic THC and frequently self-administered the drug. By comparison, rats that received saline solution did not press the lever often.

Goldberg’s team then injected the rats with a compound derived from the seeds of the Delphinium brownii plant, which is in the buttercup family. The compound, known as methyllycaconitine (MLA), had a dramatic effect on the animals’ behaviour.

On the day that they received MLA they pushed the lever for synthetic THC 70% less than before. The drug did not seem to otherwise change the rats’ movement and coordination, and had no other apparent side effects.’

‘These days, data get stored on disks, computer chips, hard drives and good old-fashioned paper.

Scientists in Japan see something far smaller but more durable – bacteria.

The four characters – T, C, A and G – that represent the genetic coding in DNA work much like digital data.

Character combinations can stand for specific letters and symbols – so codes in genomes can be translated, or read, to produce music, text, video and other content.

While ink may fade and computers may crash, bacterial information lasts as long as a species stays alive – possibly a mind-boggling million years – according to Professor Masaru Tomita, who heads the team of researchers at Keio University.’

‘According to the caller, the mysteries had actually been solved by Joseph Davidovits, Director of the Geopolymer Institute in St. Quentin, France, more than two decades ago. Davidovits claimed that the stones of the pyramids were actually made of a very early form of concrete created using a mixture of limestone, clay, lime, and water. [..]

A year and a half later, after extensive scanning electron microscope (SEM) observations and other testing, Barsoum and his research group finally began to draw some conclusions about the pyramids. They found that the tiniest structures within the inner and outer casing stones were indeed consistent with a reconstituted limestone. The cement binding the limestone aggregate was either silicon dioxide (the building block of quartz) or a calcium and magnesium-rich silicate mineral.

The stones also had a high water content-unusual for the normally dry, natural limestone found on the Giza plateau-and the cementing phases, in both the inner and outer casing stones, were amorphous, in other words, their atoms were not arranged in a regular and periodic array. Sedimentary rocks such as limestone are seldom, if ever, amorphous.

The sample chemistries the researchers found do not exist anywhere in nature. “Therefore,” says Barsoum, “it’s very improbable that the outer and inner casing stones that we examined were chiseled from a natural limestone block.”‘

‘Does your milk taste like wet cardboard? Blame the bright lights in your market’s dairy section.

“Milk stored within a few inches of fluorescent light in translucent containers usually has a detectable oxidized flavor within two to four hours and a distinct off-flavor within 12 hours,” said Robert Marshall, University of Missouri food science professor.

Fluorescent lights in dairy cases create an oxidized off-flavor in milk that some experts call ‘burnt.’ The closer the milk container is to the light, and the longer it stays there, the greater the chance of an off-flavor, Marshall said in a statement.’

This is a review of nuclear criticality accidents made in 2000 by the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

There’s 158 pages of cool technical stuff.

(3.7meg PDF)

‘Queensland health authorities have told parents to use their common sense and not use pet products to treat head lice on their children.

The warning from Chief health officer Jeannette Young came after a child became sick from a pet flea and tick product used to kill head lice.

Queensland Health would not release more information about the child but said the poisons in pet treatments had serious side-effects on humans.

“Animal products are poisons and are not safe for human use,” Dr Young said.’

‘Groups of elderly Australians are reportedly setting up backyard laboratories to manufacture an illegal euthanasia drug so they can kill themselves when they have had enough of life.

One group has already succeeded in producing the drug nembutal, which is used by vets to put down animals, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported on Monday night.

At least four other backyard factories were planned for major cities across the country, with a total of some 800 elderly people prepared to become involved in producing the drug.

Dozens of older Australians were also engaged in illegally importing nembutal from the Mexican border town of Tijuana, close to the US city of San Diego, according to the report.’

‘In October 1957, after several years of successful operation, the workers at Windscale noticed some curious readings from their temperature monitoring equipment as they carried out standard maintenance. The reactor temperature was slowly rising during a time that they expected it to be falling. The remote detection equipment seemed to be malfunctioning, so two plant workers donned protective equipment and hiked to the reactor to inspect it in person. When they arrived, they were alarmed to discover that the interior of the uranium-filled reactor was ablaze.’

‘Setting wheelie bins on fire and inhaling fumes to get high is the new ‘drug of choice’ for teenagers, police say.

The craze is behind more than 50 bin fires in Barnsley, they add.

Anti-solvent abuse charities warn that inhaling bin fumes could be more dangerous than sniffing glue or petrol.

Wheelie bins are made from high density polyethylene – composed of double-bonded carbon and hydrogen molecules.

Burning an empty one releases carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.

These deadly gases starve the brain of oxygen, giving a headacheheavy short high.’

What the fuck is wrong with children these days?

‘On January 16, 2007, a dazzling blue flame blasted across the sands of the Mojave desert. In many respects, it looked like an ordinary rocket engine test, but this was different. While most NASA rockets are powered by liquid oxygen and hydrogen or solid chemicals, “we were testing a methane engine,” says project manager Terri Tramel of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). [..]

The main engine, built and fired by the NASA contractor team Alliant Techsystems/XCOR Aerospace, is still in an early stage of development and isn’t ready for space. But if the technology proves itself, methane engines like this one could eventually be key to deep space exploration.

Methane (CH4), the principal component of natural gas, is abundant in the outer solar system. It can be harvested from Mars, Titan, Jupiter, and many other planets and moons. With fuel waiting at the destination, a rocket leaving Earth wouldn’t have to carry so much propellant, reducing the cost of a mission.’

Check out the video.

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‘An environmental consulting firm and other developers here have come up with a non-perishable food pack that creates steaming hot rice with the simple addition of cold water.

The group has recently introduced the product, named “Hotto! Raisu,” to the market.

By subjecting rice to 4,000 times normal atmospheric pressure, the developers were able to preserve rice for long periods in a soft form that holds moisture. When water is poured over an exothermic agent in the pack, steam warms the rice contained within, and after about 15 minutes, the dish is piping hot.’

All you need is an empty box of matches and fingers.

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‘In praise of the opaque green liqueur beloved by his creative contemporaries, Oscar Wilde once posed the rhetorical question, “What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?”

The prosaic answer, at least for Americans, has long been one of legality: sunsets can be freely enjoyed, but absinthe was forbidden because it contained thujone, a potentially toxic compound.

Intrepid drinkers have worked around the ban by ordering imported bottles off the Internet or smuggling them back from Eastern Europe. Now they have a third, less dodgy option: Lucid, which is being marketed as the first legal, genuine American absinthe in nearly a century.’