Archive for the ‘science news’ Category:
Hydrogen Sulfide Suicide
by azmanam on Mar 15 2010 (2105 Views)I woke up this morning to Breaking News on my local morning news. Police responded to a suspicious vehicle call around 10pm, where they found a woman slumped over in her car. Police opened the door, whereupon they discovered a bucket with chemicals on the front seat. The officer was overcome with the fumes and treated at the hospital for burning in his throat. His condition is as yet unknown.
The regional hazmat team evacuated the surrounding neighborhood while they attempted to remove the woman from the car. The woman did not survive.
The police are not releasing details of the chemical used, but it appears to be related to a similar suicide on the other side of town in February. In that case, the victim left notes all over the car saying, “Do not open!!! poison gas!!! hydrogen sulfide.” Another note, in part, read “hazmat team needed.” When hazmat crews opened the car in that case, they measured levels of hydrogen sulfide more than 3 times the lethal limit.
Hydrogen sulfide (HS) (MSDS) is a colorless, highly flammable gas. Humans can detect hydrogen sulfide at low concentrations, where it smells like rotten eggs. Higher levels (~40 ppm) can irritate mucous membranes and cause headache, fatigue, dizziness, and even memory loss and bronchitis on repeated exposure. At concentrations 50-400 ppm, can produce cough, dyspnea, hemoptysis, cyanosis, agitation, vertigo, confusion, nausea and vomiting, tremulousness, cardiac arrhythmias, hypertension, and, possibly, loss of consciousness. According to one source, “just 2-3 breaths of HS at >700 ppm can cause immediate death.” Most notably, prolonged exposure quickly leads to “olfactory fatigue” whereupon you can no longer smell hydrogen sulfide and can no longer detect its presence.
The mode of action is as follows: “The major route of toxicity for HS is by inhalation. At lower doses, local irritant effects predominate. At higher exposures, cellular respiration may cease as HS forms a complex bond to the iron ion in mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase, arresting aerobic metabolism in an effect similar to cyanide toxicity and affecting all organs, particularly the nervous system.”
It’s no secret that chemicals can be used for nefarious purposes. Perhaps the most familiar is death by cyanide poisoning, with perhaps the most infamous case being the suicide of graduate student Jason Altom at Harvard in 1998. Atropine, adrenaline, carbon monoxide, chloroform, and even the bizarre UK case of assassination by polonium. The educated chemist has only a thin line to cross when reaching across the chemical shelf. A good dose of respect with a large side of humility is in order as we remember the power of the knowledge we have attained.
Suicide by hydrogen sulfide was new to me. But a wave of this type of chemical suicide swept Japan beginning in 2008. A USA Today article written in July 2008 noted over 500 deaths so far that year from hydrogen sulfide. One teen, who released the gas in her apartment, sickened more than 80 people throughout the complex as the gas spread from unit to unit. Isolated cases have appeared throughout the United States in the past few years, including these two around me in the last 3 weeks.
Fortunately, emergency management teams have produced a number of documents to aid emergency responders. The CDC, St. Louis University, and Shelby County (KY) EMS have good information for first responders.
Previous Chemistry Blog post on suicides in chemistry.
On behalf of the Chemistry Blog community, anyone struggling with thoughts of suicide – especially anyone who came to this page today for that reason – is urged to call 911, your local emergency response number, or any of the numerous national and local suicide hotlines available. The comments of this post will be closely monitored. Anyone attempting to post recipes for the generation of hydrogen sulfide gas will have their comments removed immediately.
Update: Chemjobber sends along an article from The Atlantic magazine talking in sometimes raw emotion about the suicide mentality that seems to be problematic in parts of Japan.
Subscribe to the comments for this post
Biology professor allegedly involved in shooting
by Chemjobber on Feb 13 2010 (5713 Views)
Suspect in UAH shooting - credit Huntsville Times, Dave Dieter
News broke this afternoon that there was a shooting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s Shelby Hall. It took me a while to find that this is (among other things) the home of UAH’s chemistry department. While CNN hasn’t filled in the details, the Huntsville Times already has reported that biology Professor Amy Bishop was taken into custody and her husband has been detained for the deaths of 3 faculty members and the wounding of 3 others.
While stunning and tragic, this would not have rated a post except for the alleged reason for the shooting: denial of tenure. According to the New York Times:
WAFF, the NBC affiliate in Huntsville, quoted university officials as saying the professor began shooting after learning at the faculty meeting that she was being denied tenure…
Dr. Bishop had told acquaintances recently that she was worried about getting tenure, said a business associate who met her at a business technology open house at the end of January and asked not to be named because of the close-knit nature of the science community in Huntsville. “She began to talk about her problems getting tenure in a very forceful and animated way, saying it was unfair,” the associate said, referring to a conversation in which she blamed specific colleagues for her problems.
Wow. Denial of tenure must be crushing for an assistant professor, especially since the process must seem protracted, random and unfair (at times). The really surprising detail is that (allegedly) she brought a gun; that’s an indication of a willingness to use violence and a certain level of forethought as to the potential outcome of the meeting. (CORRECTED: see update below.) Academic science is high pressure indeed.
My (our) thoughts are with the families of the victims.
UPDATE: From the AP:
University spokesman Ray Garner said Saturday that the professor, Amy Bishop, had been informed months ago that she would not be granted tenure. He said the faculty meeting where she is accused of gunning down colleagues was not called to discuss tenure.
How Water Freezes Lower on a Negatively Charged Surface
by orgopete on Feb 10 2010 (3317 Views)I first heard this on National Public Radio and then I searched for it. In short, David Ehre, Etay Lavert, Meir Lahav, and Igor Lubomirsky report in Science, (Water Freezes Differently on Positively and Negatively Charged Surfaces of Pyroelectric Materials) water freezes at a lower temperature (-18°C) on the negatively charged side of a lithium tantalate plate with a strontium titanate film than on the positive side (-7°C, and -12°C uncharged).
Is this unique or is this a manifestation of something in our standard introductory organic chemistry textbooks? I thought it was the latter. Let me explain how.
For the purpose of thinking about this problem, let us assume the metal surface is simply a flat charged surface, without contour. If the surface has a negative charge, then the water should be attracted like a flagpole. One hydrogen should be anchored to the surface of the metal at right angles and the other hydrogen could spin about that axis with the flag hydrogen at 105°. It should not be surprising that this configuration should not be as good of a surface as one with greater rigidity.
If we compare with the positively charged surface, then both pairs of non-bonded electrons should be anchored to the surface and locking the hydrogens in a fixed position. This should limit the degrees of freedom and enable crystal growth.
For those that may be wondering where this is found in your textbook, it may not be there. The negatively charged surface is the one that seemingly will have the most important stereochemical constraints and information in a textbook. The analogy I was comparing is the stereochemical restrictions of proton transfer reactions. In that context, the angle between a proton and donor-acceptor electron pairs in a hydrogen bond is usually 180°. One can find smaller bond angles in intramolecular proton transfer reactions, such as the decarboxylation of a beta-ketoacid or a Cope elimination reaction of an amine-oxide as six and five-membered ring examples.
You may also encounter a … transition state which transfers a proton via a four-membered ring. While this mechanism is present in some textbooks, I am troubled by a lack of precedent for this proton transfer. In a normal hydrogen bond, the preferred bond angle is 180°. Variations from 180° are commonly found in six and five-membered rings …
While the four-membered ring is expedient and avoids a zwitterionic intermediate, I am skeptical sufficient experimental data exists to support it. In the normal hydrogen bond, the electron-electron repulsion forces the nuclei to be linear. While smaller angles are present in six and five-membered rings, a continued decrease in bond angle increases the electron-electron repulsion exponentially as predicted by Coulomb’s Law. This could be compensated for with a large nucleus…. A larger nucleus can attract electrons and mitigate their repulsion. However, I have resisted writing any examples of proton transfers via four-membered ring intermediates. [A Handbook of Organic Chemistry Mechanisms, p 65]
I could have drawn a model with two attachments points for water. That would probably look better if a plane charged surface is present rather than several pairs of electrons. If a two point model were to be present, then another model for the melting point difference is needed.
P.S. this is my first post here. As I often seem to think of something bleeding edge, not obvious, heretical, or downright wrong, I hope if there were any comments, this is just an idea. I may change my mind tomorrow.
Good News: Lancet Article Author Cooks Data on Vaccine/Autism Link Updated and Bumped: Lancet Retracts Wakefield’s 1998 Paper
by azmanam on Feb 02 2010 (4473 Views)(See important update, below)
The Times of London yesterday ran a story that Jenny McCarthy needs to read (h/t HotAir.com). The article details an investigation of the results of the 1998 paper in the Lancet medical journal which shows a link between thimerosal in MMR vaccines and autism. The investigation concludes the author, Andrew Wakefield, manipulated data to show the link.
Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.
The research … claimed that the families of eight out of 12 children attending a routine clinic at the hospital had blamed MMR for their autism, and said that problems came on within days of the jab. The team also claimed to have discovered a new inflammatory bowel disease underlying the children’s conditions.
However, our investigation … reveals that: In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal.
How convincing was Dr. Wakefield’s article? Vaccination rates in the UK dropped from 98% to below 80%. Some 1350 cases of measles have been confirmed in the UK, a 2400% increase over the number of confirmed cases in 1998.
Besides the obvious implications of manipulated data, no one seemed too concerned that Dr. Wakefield’s sample in the 1998 paper included only 12 children. Time after time after time, studies have tried to replicate Dr. Wakefield’s results. Not surprisingly (anymore), no one was able to. Yet, that doesn’t stop parents from receiving news time warning about vaccines, the CDC from needing to issue a statement on the safety of thimerosal, the HHS from issuing money from the vaccine injury fund (!), and major presidential candidates from telling town hall attendees that there is a “strong link” between thimerosal and autism.
I don’t even think this qualifies for an Ig Nobel award. It’s just infuriating.
Update (2/2/10): Today, the Lancet Medical Journal officially retracted Dr. Wakefield’s original 1998 paper. The retraction was the final domino to fall in officially discrediting the specious claim linking thimerosal and autism. How long will it take to rid the vaccine-autism link from the minds of worried parents? That’s a different question. Hopefully, though, doctors can now use this to help persuade overly-worried parents that vaccines are indeed safe.
Ditch the Dimetapp?
by azmanam on Nov 22 2009 (3632 Views)I just finished up the teaching part of my teaching fellowship. I got to teach five weeks of an undergrad organic class, and I had a blast! As the seasons started to change, though, I started to hear more and more coughing and sneezing and sniffling. Everyone’s all concerned with the swine flu, but we’re also entering cough and cold season, too.
The news I’m presenting today from ScienceDaily is old news, but I hadn’t heard it before… That makes it news to me 
In an article published in 2004 in the journal Pediatrics (DOI: 10.1542/peds.114.1.e85), Dr. Ian Paul of Penn State Children’s Hospital studied the effect of dextromethorphan and diphenhydramine versus placebo in providing nighttime relief from cough symptoms as a result of upper respiratory infection.
Dextromethorphan is sold as an antitussive (cough medicine) in just about every cough formulation known to man. The study specifically tested cough syrups in children ages 2-18. Parents were given a survey to used to rate severity of symptoms. The following morning, parents filled out a second survey re-rating the same symptoms. The follow up survey also asked how both the children and parents slept during the night.
The double blind study showed that while symptoms did improve with the active ingredients, there was no statistical improvement over placebo. On the scoring scale used in the study, children taking dextromethorphan improved 10.06 points, while those taking diphenhydramine improved an average of 11.79 points. By comparison, children in the placebo group improved 10.85 points.
Given that dextromethorphan can easily be abused when taken in high doses, one wonders whether a spoonful of sugar (in the form of honey) might be as good of a cough syrup as any. Keep this in mind when you browse the shelf at the drug store this winter.
LHC at Operating Temperature
by azmanam on Oct 16 2009 (2011 Views)ScienceInsider is reporting news out of CERN today that all sectors of the LHC have reached operating temperature of 1.9 K. You’ll recall we went through this buildup of emotion last year, only to be disappointed when the particle accelerator broke down. Now that the magnets are cool, the team is slowly building up the current to the desired 6 kA needed for correct particle guidance.
Also in place are new detection systems aimed to prevent another disaster like last year. Readings will be taken in closer to real time to allow better overall monitoring of the various components of the system.
ScienceInsider claims beams will be in orbit sometime in November, followed by low energy collisions sometime in December. They’ll ramp up the energy of the collisions slowly and probably won’t get to the cool collisions until January at the earliest. (/sarc)
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009 Analyzed
by mitch on Oct 07 2009 (3760 Views) Ada Yonath |
 Thomas Steitz |
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
As already announced biologists walked away with this year’s Nobel prize in chemistry once again, this time for work in determining the structure of Ribosomes. Read here for more and more information. We at Chemistry Blog like to quantitate and analyze like any good chemist. But how do we quantitate how badly chemists were denied? Easily, we have ChemFeeds.
ChemFeeds is my little graphical abstracts portal. It tracks 39 chemistry journals. It isn’t an all inclusive list of all chemistry journals, but it is a good representative cross-section: ChemComm, JACS, CrystEngComm, DaltonTrans, JOC, JNatProd, InorgChem, Macromolecules, OrgBiomolChem, OrgLett, Organometallics, JChemInfComSci, JOPCA, JOPCB, JOPCC, PhysChemChemPhys, Analyst, JAAS, ACS NANO, AdvFunctMater, AdvMater, ChemMater, JMaterChem, Langmuir, NanoLett, Small, Biochemistry, Biomacromolecules, ChemResToxicol, IntergrBiol, JCombChem, JMedChem, JProteomeRes, MolPharm, EnergyEnvironSci, GreenChem, JEnvironMonit, NewJChem, SoftMatter.
The database for ChemFeeds is a little shy of a year old. If we search the ChemFeeds database for the occurrence of ribosome we get 7 abstracts in the last year. If we search for GFP we get 2 hits (subtracting the Nobel lectures). What about if we search for other topics most chemists thought deserved a Nobel nod and make a table (chemists love tables).
| Topic | ChemFeeds Abstracts | Google Hits | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| ribosome | 7 | 1,920,000 | 2009 Winner |
| GFP | 2 | 2,850,000 | 2008 Winner |
| dye-sensitized solar + dye sensitized solar |
90 | 852,000 | 2009 Thomson Reuters Pick + Ψ*Ψ |
| radical polymerization | 64 | 480,000 | LiqC |
| cross-coupling + cross coupling + Heck |
148 | 328,000 (not including term Heck) |
Excimer |
| single molecule + single-molecule |
123 | 1,040,000 |
Kyle Finchsigmate |
The analysis shows that although chemists do not concern themselves with GFP or ribosomes, they are still well represented in Google and on some level deserve recognition for their reach. Dye-sensitized solar cells are the new in thing in chemistry, but from an energy perspective they make up a very small percentage of what we as humanity derive our energy (i.e. oil, nuclear, hydrothermal), but it almost makes it past 1,000,000 in Google hits. Radical polymerization, an important reaction used everywhere, but perhaps too established to get a Nobel but then again CCD cameras got the nod. Cross coupling, the most popular subject amongst chemists and can only be ignored by the Nobel committee for so long. Single molecule studies obviously strongly represented in the current literature and is more far reaching in Google than cross-coupling reactions, so that field will be ripe for a Nobel.
As chemists we would like to see the Nobel chemistry prize go to a chemist. Our Nobel hopefuls may be a measurable magnitude more chemically interesting, as measured by ChemFeeds, but there is more work for them to do until these topics become world renowned (which seems to be the dominant prerequisite these days).
Update: You can finally MySQL query the ChemFeeds database yourself: Search ChemFeeds
Mitch
P.S. I get 215,000 Google hits searching for my name exactly, Mitch Andre Garcia, but it doesn’t mean I’m winning a Nobel; although it probably does mean I should spend less time online.
2009 Ig Nobels!
by azmanam on Oct 03 2009 (5342 Views)The 2009 Ig Nobels have been announced. The chemistry winner is the team of Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño from Mexico for growing diamonds from tequila:
Abstract: Diamond thin films were growth using Tequila as precursor by Pulsed Liquid Injection Chemical Vapor Deposition (PLI-CVD) onto both silicon (100) and stainless steel 304 at 850 °C. The diamond films were characterized by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Raman spectroscopy. The spherical crystallites (100 to 400 nm) show the characteristic 1332 cm-1 Raman band of diamond.
Other notables:
- The Peace Prize goes to Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland for determining whether it’s better to be cracked over the head by a full or empty beer bottle. (doi: 10.1016/j.jflm.2008.07.013)
- The Medicine Prize goes to Donald L. Unger for investigating whether cracking knuckles leads to arthritis. He systematically cracked the knuckles of his left hand (but not his right) every day for 60 years. His findings: neither hand had arthritis showing no correlation between knuckle cracking and arthritis. Money quote from paper: “This result calls into question whether other parental beliefs, e.g., the importance of eating spinach, are also flawed. Further investigation is likely warranted.”. (doi: 10.1002/1529-0131(199805)41:5<949::AID-ART36>3.0.CO;2-3) (yes, that’s really the DOI)
- The Public Health Prize goes to Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan for a patent for a brassier which can – in life threatening emergency – be converted into two functional face masks. (US Patent: 7255627) Picture included:
A Tooth in an M&M?
by azmanam on Sep 12 2009 (7303 Views)
A Raleigh, NC, woman bit into a peanut M&M… and something didn’t feel right. Instead of a peanut, she found… this (Via the Raleigh News & Observer):
[UPDATE: Photo removed at the request of the N&O. Click the link above to see the image.]
What would you do?
She called Mars (the candy maker), who quickly sent her coupons and an envelope for her to send the mystery object to Mars labs for testing.
Uh… no. She actually wanted to know what the object was, and didn’t trust Mars to be forthcoming with her results.
After calling a number of state departments and university labs, the News & Observer got involved as part of their Troubleshooter program. Most state labs and departments either didn’t have the resources or wouldn’t do the testing, or referred her to private labs (costing upwards of $1000 dollars for testing).
Finally, the N&O talked to the Agriculture Department’s Food and Drug Protection Division.
The director decided to make an exception – as long as the woman agreed not to sue – and got to work.
What tests would you run? In short order, the director found out what the object was. Was it tooth? Bone? Something else? If you were the director, what would you do to find out what was in the M&M? Find out below the jump.
PostDoc Unions: Good Idea, or not?
by azmanam on Jul 23 2009 (2131 Views)ScienceInsider is reporting that Rutgers University postdocs have formed a union. Rutgers becomes (at least) the third school in the nation to organize into a union, joining the UC system and the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington (edit: and it seems University of Washington and University of Massachusetts)
Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Postdocs are sort of the limbo of the graduate/professional career. Sometimes you need one more bullet point on your resume. Sometimes you’re learning a new field to be a good well rounded scientist. Sometimes it just feels like what ‘everyone does’ before that first real job.
You’re in the lab with grad students, but you’re not a grad student. You’re paid better, and generally have more freedoms… but still bend to the will of the PI/research group. No worrying about cumes or orals or dissertations, but sometimes feeling like you’re in a constant cycle of applying for real jobs.
The lead organizer of the union movement at Rutgers is quoted as saying, “By unionizing, we joined the rest of the university community.” They’ll begin contract negotiations in the fall on issues such as wage, paid sickleave, benefits, childcare, and others. But due to the transient nature of the postdoc position, not everyone feels it makes sense to organize. Turnover is realatively high in the postdoc field. Some UC postdocs also noted some questionable behavior on the part of union organizers as signatures were being gathered.
UC postdocs currently do not have a contract, despite having voted to organize almost a year ago. You can follow the progress of contract negotiations here. One of the updates notes a consequence of organizing during a state-wide budget crisis (emphasis in original):
[UC system] President [Mark] Yudof has publicly proposed in his June 17 letter to the UC community pay cuts and/or furloughs for all UC employees, including Postdocs. President Yudof is proposing to raise this issue with the UC Regents on July 14 and 15. To be perfectly clear, wages and leaves are mandatory topics of bargaining. Since we have formed a union and are in contract negotiations, NO CHANGES CAN BE MADE TO POSTDOC TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF WORK WITHOUT BARGAINING THE CHANGES WITH PRO/UAW.
So what do you think? Are postdoc unions a good idea or a bad idea? What about graduate student unions? What would it mean if the postdoc union went on strike? What benefits would organizing bring to the postdoc landscape?
