Crystals And Catalysts

Sometimes when I blog, I feel like my posts aren’t being read by the audience I want it to reach – what I’m communicating isn’t reaching the audience which includes people who aren’t scientists or science communicators. It’s fantastic that scientists and science communicators encourage each other, read and learn from each other’s science blogs, but I don’t think we should keep science to ourselves, just between us scientists, or as Richard P Grant described it (albeit a bit harshly) as “tribalism”. We need to think about the impact science communicators have on the public in this day and age; although there may be a lot of science communicators, our message is not getting out to the public; who is meant to be our main audience, so science isn’t restricted to scientists only. Why should we care about who reads our blogs? One of the major issues we are facing is the issue regarding parents who are refusing to vaccinate their children.  In the year 1998, Dr Andrew Wa

It has been a couple of months since I attended the science communication primer, held by the British Science Association, and I wasn’t originally going to review the day, but I thought it would be useful for those of you who might be thinking about going into science communication, and if your thinking about attending a similar event. It was held at Conway Hall in Holborn, London and was attended by a range of speakers including Dr Stephen Webster (ICL), Tom Chivers (Buzzfeed) and Mun Keat Looi (Mosaic) and much more. Overall the day was an enlightening experience and I learnt a lot from each of the speakers and their views of science communication and their backgrounds. Although it was a chilly October day, the hall was packed with a full-house of aspiring science communicators.  We all came from extremely different backgrounds but our intentions/goals were the same. The day started off with an introduction and welcome by Katherine Mathieson who then introduce

Doesn't that sound crazy? After years of research, scientists have discovered that we have a new organ in our bodies. You'd think that with all of the dissections of the human body over 100 years of anatomy study, that we would know everything about the human body by now, but no! There is still more to learn and I wonder what else do we not know about our bodies? The new organ is located in our digestive system, specifically connecting the abdomen and intestines and it looks like this and it's called the MESENTERY: Image courtesy of The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology and Science Alert For hundreds of years, the mesentery had been considered a fragmented structure made up of multiple separate parts. However, research by Professor of Surgery at UL’s Graduate Entry Medical School, J Calvin Coffey, found the mesentery is one, continuous structure. J Calvin Coffey, University of Limerick  said: “In the paper, which has been peer reviewed and assessed,

I'm sure you've seen, fairly recently, a lot of advertisements calling for blood donation. Particularly in the U.K where the NHS pleads for blood donation so that hospitals and ambulances have enough blood in their blood bank to be able to provide it to patients during emergencies. However sometimes donations aren't enough, and science needs to find another solution, albeit temporary, to provide "man-made" blood for use in emergency blood transfusions. The need increases especially when stored blood is unavailable or undesirable. Undesirable being defined as the blood type of the donor blood is not compatible with the patient's blood type or there isn’t enough blood ready for transfusion with the patient’s blood type. Artificial Oxygen Carrier Dr. Doctor and his colleges and his team have developed ErythroMer which is a new artificial blood substitute which is currently under trials, testing its efficacy before its official use in health

It’s a time of uncertainty. Ever since the vote for Brexit happened science in the UK has been affected and that’s certainly no secret.  Although Britain is not completely out of the European Union yet, there are a few disturbances which have started to show ever since the results were released. The main consequence was the “burning of the bridges” - the relationship between the UK and the EU has been severed so that scientists in the EU do not feel welcome to collaborating with scientists in the UK. Brexit has even affected the quantity of international students who applied to study in higher education in the U.K this year, with many international students pulling out their places from UK universities after the Brexit vote, leaving many gaps unfilled.  This shouldn’t be a time where collaborating over research becomes a difficult task says Martin Rees in Nature’s micro article. Convinced that independent research councils work better than governmental agencies; he also recomme

Whilst you're reading this, hundreds of clinical studies are taking place to find the latest breakthrough drug in diabetes, heart, immunological or rare diseases that only affect a handful of people but are debilitating. The results of these trials are being published monthly in medical journals, most with positive results; but to what degree can a member of the public trust the results of clinical trials; particularly those sponsored by big pharmaceutical companies? How much does the public trust clinical trials? With the amount of work that is being done recently,   public trust in clinical trials has been improving although not to the needed extent. In 2013, a public survey conducted by the Health Research Authority (HRA) for the NHS, respondents had less confidence in health research studies undertaken by the pharmaceutical industry. In this survey, there were 1,295 adults aged 18 years or more from across England in 2013. Only 27% of participants in t

You may or may not have realised that there's been a bit of confusion around my blog over the weekend as I tried to move my blog over to wordpress.com (there's a big difference between wordpress.org and wordpress.com - will explain in depth below) but I wasn't completely successful and so I restored my blog back on blogger - my safe home. :) Reasons why I wanted to move to WordPress: It's a more professional It's recommended that more bloggers should use it since it's more flexible and professional for blogging The majority of science blogs are hosted on WordPress How I tried to move over (and only partially succeeded) I used the instructions from this website , and the coding to move to WordPress, I imported my files to my WordPress.com blog and I managed to set a redirect from my blogger blog to my WordPress blog that I had set up. But, this was only partly successful because I couldn't figure out how to set up a redirect for my individu

 Today's posts is in the form of an infographic, with a simple topic today: the brain and controlling how much food we eat and what types of food we eat.  Please give all the right credits and link back to this post if you'd like to share this infographic. Thanks!

Garden grass could become a source of cheap and clean renewable energy, scientists at Cardiff University, UK, have claimed . They have shown that significant amounts of hydrogen can be unlocked from fescue grass with the help of sunlight and a cheap catalyst; hy drogen is contained in enormous quantities all over in the world in water, hydrocarbons and other organic matter and there is a serious need to release hydrogen from these sources in a cheap, efficient and sustainable way. This process is called photoreforming or photocatalysis and involves the sunlight activating the catalyst (metal based: palladium, gold and nickel) which then gets to work on converting cellulose and water into hydrogen− their “results show that significant amounts of hydrogen can be produced using this method with the help of a bit of sunlight and a cheap catalyst”. [1] Caravaca A. et al,    Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Science , 2016; 472 (2191) [2]

Happy 2nd Birthday to my blog! - what have I achieved in the last two years? I cannot believe it's been two years since I started blogging about science (where does time go?!) But I guess time flies when you're having fun... I dived into the deep end when I started this blog, after being hesitant to start it for about a year. Now it's something I am very happy and proud to have initiated and made it into a "portfolio" for my writing - which I'm still working on, still practising (I am not a professional - yet! ;) ). Why I started my blog? Becuase I wanted a career change. After I graduated I didn't feel like my place was in the lab. Not that I hate working in the lab, actually the opposite, I loved it. But I think that as much as the world needs great scientific research it also needs great science communication. What have I gained so far? My job as a junior medical writer in medical communications! (although medical communi

Whether it's stress or spending too much time focusing on computer/laptop screens we’re all susceptible to experiencing migraines and some people suffer from them even more than others; and we have heard many recommendations on how to prevent migraines, such as drinking plenty of water, but not the actual reasons why we get migraines. Researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Centre have found that a high percentage of children, teens and young adults with migraines appear to have mild deficiencies in vitamin D, riboflavin and coenzyme Q10. It’s possible that these deficiencies may play a role in the onset of migraines but this is still unclear, based on existing studies. In this study, the researchers’ trial drew from a database that looks at vitamin D, riboflavin and coenzyme Q10, all of which are all associated with migraines to some degree, and this has been reported in many previous research studies, some studies have even conflicted each other. Most of

It has been just over 6 months since we had heard of the identification of 4 new elements in the periodic table. Just recently the elements have been given proposed names.  As a reminder, here's is some information about the four new elements which had their discovery confirmed in January of this year (2016) Element 113 – currently known by its placeholder name ununtrium – is the first to be discovered in east Asia. It was created by  Kosuke Morita ’s group at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based Science in Japan, by firing a beam of zinc-70 at a target made of bismuth-209. The group first claimed to have created the element in 2004, but there was still some uncertainty at that time because of the instability of one of its decay products. They followed up these experiments with  more convincing evidence in 2012 . Elements 115 (ununpentium) and 117 (ununseptium) were discovered by groups collaborating across three institutions – Lawrence Livermore National Labora

Researchers at Northwestern University, USA, have succeeded in finding a drug that can clear psoriasis in the body, almost completely and   the great majority of the responses persist at least 60 weeks . The new drug called ixekizumab, tradename Taltz ® , is  a monoclonal antibody, prescribed to those with moderate to severe psoriasis. Research published in the prestigious journal, New England Journal of Medicine ; reports the results of 3 large, long-term clinical trials which saw 80% of patients psoriasis completely or almost completely cleared.  Psoriasis affects 3% of the world population. It is an immune-mediated inflammatory disease and its most significant symptom is itchy, dry and red skin. Accompanying those uncomfortable symptoms, psoriasis is also associated with an increased risk of depression, heart disease, and diabetes. What are Phase 3 trials? ( Understanding the Drug Discovery Process- Compound Interest ) "Usually 1000-3000 people, gauge

New experiments conducted as a simulation of the human oesophagus and stomach, have shown that a tiny origami robot that can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule and, steered by external magnetic fields, crawl across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery or patch a wound. Could we already be seeing the future in the technology of surgeries? This isn’t the first time that this type of technology has been introduced to the world. A predecessor was introduced last year at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation . Even though this years new robot is a successor to one reported at the same conference last year, the design of its body is significantly different. Like its predecessor, it can propel itself using what's called a "stick-slip" motion, in which its appendages stick to a surface through friction when it executes a move, but slip free again when its body flexes to change its weight distribution. Also like its predecessor -- a

Paracetamol is the most common painkiller which we all rely on to treat our aches and pains, but it turns out that you might also be  decreasing your empathy for both the physical and social pains that other people experience, a new study conducted at Ohio State University suggests.  It turns out that paracetamol may not only be a painkiller but also an emotion-killer. Researchers found that, for example, when participants in the study took paracetamol and were informed of the misfortunes of others  they thought these individuals experienced less pain and suffering,when compared to those who took no painkiller. "These findings suggest other people's pain doesn't seem as big of a deal to you when you've taken acetaminophen," said Dominik Mischkowski, co-author of the study and a former Ph.D. student at Ohio State, now at the National Institutes of Health. "Acetaminophen can reduce empathy as well as serve as a painkiller." This research