Drudge report has a copy of the press release scheduled to be released today at 2pm.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft may have found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt in Yellowstone-like geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The rare occurrence of liquid water so near the surface raises many new questions about the mysterious moon.

[...]

“Other moons in the solar system have liquid-water oceans covered by kilometers of icy crust,” said Andrew Ingersoll, imaging team member and atmospheric scientist at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. “What’s different here is that pockets of liquid water may be no more than tens of meters below the surface.”

Liquid water, of course, is one of the things that most scientists consider necessary for life to potentially develop, which makes this announcement so exciting. While there may be liquid water, my money is on there not being life on Encedalus. Time will tell.

[tags]Enceladus, E.T., alien life, Saturn, NASA[/tags]

Jupiter seems to be growing a second red spot as you can see in the image above. The official name is Oval BA, but Red Jr seems to be a better choice. Red Jr first appeared in the year 2000 when three smaller spots collided and merged. It is the same color as the original red spot which is at least 300 years old and is twice as wide as the Earth. Red Jr. wasn’t always red:

“The oval was white in November 2005, it slowly turned brown in December 2005, and red a few weeks ago,” reports Go. “Now it is the same color as the Great Red Spot!”

Why it’s red, no one is precisely sure. The theory goes that the storm is so powerful, it has picked up material from deep beneath Jupiter’s clouds and lifts it to high altitudes where UV radiation produces the brick color by some unknown chemical reaction. Raising such material would require a tremendous amount of energy: the Great Red Spot towers some 5 miles (8km) above the surrounding clouds. It maybe be that Red Jr. has become powerful enough to do the same.

[tags]Great Red Spot, Oval BA, Jupiter, solar system[/tags]

Malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum is one of the leading causes of death in the third world, especially among children. Becoming immune to all of the variations of Plasmodium malaria can take upwards of five years. The reason for this is because of the cloaking capabilities the parasite has evolved over the years. A process called epigenetic silencing allows the Plasmodium to express only one antigenic protein at a time. As there are about 60 genes that can be turned on and off, this means the body must learn to recognize 60 different forms of the same organism.

A distributed computing project out of France aims to tackle drug-discovery for Plasmodium-mediated malaria. Using software developed by the Fraunhofer Institute — the same people that developed the MP3 codec — the project narrows down the list of possible drug candidates to a select few which will be further analyzed by supercomputer.

The project, called Wide In Silico Docking on Malaria (WISDOM) to model 3D structures of proteins from Plasmodium to ligands: the chemical compounds that bind to protein receptors. The massive parallelism was achieved by assigning one ligand to one protein to each node on the grid. Computing the probability of a match can take a few seconds to a few minutes.

The project joins myriad other distributed computing projects in the life sciences, many of which are specifically drug-discovery efforts for diseases ranging from cancer to AIDS to anthrax and even Ebola.

[tags]WISDOM, distributed computing, grid computing, malaria, plasmodium falciparum[/tags]

The new method is quite different.

The hydrogen tablet is safe and inexpensive. In this respect it is different from most other hydrogen storage technologies. You can literally carry the material in your pocket without any kind of safety precaution. The reason is that the tablet consists solely of ammonia absorbed efficiently in sea-salt. Ammonia is produced by a combination of hydrogen with nitrogen from the surrounding air, and the DTU-tablet therefore contains large amounts of hydrogen. Within the tablet, hydrogen is stored as long as desired, and when hydrogen is needed, ammonia is released through a catalyst that decomposes it back to free hydrogen. When the tablet is empty, you merely give it a “shot” of ammonia and it is ready for use again.

I can see it now: we’ll all go to our gas stations and fill up on ammonia — which is dangerous — and drive around in our quiet H-powered cars. Cars powered by hydrogen do not emit carbon dioxide (or carbon monoxide, for that matter), and the hydrogen can be produced by renewable energy sources, such as wind power, completely cutting fossil fuels out of the picture.

I’d like more details on the conversion process from ammonia to free hydrogen. Jan-Willem points out that the storage of hydrogen is largely the last/greatest barrier to widespread hydrogen fuel cell adoption. (Besides inertia.)

• New shells that use a chemical reaction to burn through armor plating are on the horizon. Instead of using depleted uranium shells which are toxic to the environment, the new technique uses to chemicals, that, when mashed together, create tremendous heat almost instantly, burning through armor. I wonder what this hopes to accomplish, save burning a hole in something. Will there be some sort of anti-personnel round underneath, or will the reaction simply burn everyone to death instead?
• New advances when it comes to isolating the toxins that cause wheat gluten intolerance. One person out of 200 in the West is affected by gluten intolerance, which severely limits their diet. A person who is wheat gluten intolerant cannot eat pasta, cereal, bread, or many of the other staples that most people enjoy. By isolating the two aggravating types, this raises hopes that wheat products without these two toxins can be developed.
• Household toxins can be transferred across the placenta. This isn’t especially surprising, since most foreign substances cross the placenta but it’s worth mentioning in the light of Hurricane Katrina. Jonathan has a good writeup in this week’s Science.Ars that explains why toxins in battered New Orleans are as big a health issue as disease proliferation through dirty water. In the case of a fetus, these toxins, including plasticizers, can cause significant damage to a developing baby.

The probable cause is high levels of hexachlorobenzene (HCB) — which can disrupt hormone balances — and phthalates. Phthalates are plasticizers: they make hard plastic malleable, such as turning PVC into a flexible plastic. They’re also found in things like nail polish. Those living in the Aamjiwnaang community haven’t been tested for chemicals for some reason, but the chemicals at the top of the list of possible culprits.

Most guys might love to be born into a community where the ratio of men to women is skewed so badly, but many of the males born have slight birth defects, as male fetuses exposed to phthalates in the womb have smaller penises than males who have not.

While not conclusive until chemical testing has been done — despite what the New Scientist article says — this is the first research being done that might show direct evidence of chemicals feminizing fetuses in the womb.

A “me-too” drug is a drug that has its origins in another drug. Probably the most famous example of this is Prilosec (“The Purple Pill”) and Nexium (“Today’s Purple Pill”). Prilosec’s active ingredient is omeprazole. Nexium’s active ingredient is called esomeprazole.

What’s the difference? Well, Nexium is the left-handed version of omeprazole. In chemistry, S stands for sinister, which means the molecular conformation has a left-handed orientation. (D would be right handed.) So this S-omeprazole is one half of the mixture that comprises it’s predecessor. By specifically picking only the S conformation, the drug is made more potent. This sounds great, but its efficacy is only marginally better than Prilosec — which has a generic version, and costs about a third less than Nexium.

Is this slight increase in efficacy worth 1/3 more? Well, AstraZeneca’s own research suggests that they are not. Nexium was created because AZ’s patent on Prilosec was finally running out, and they wanted to continue to making money from one of their flagship drugs so they released a new version that costs more and performed only partially better. This is the classic definition of a “me-too” drug. Often the research is sort of doctored to make the new drug seem much better than the old. In the case of Nexium, the literature put out by AstraZeneca compared 20mg of Prilosec to 40mg of Nexium. Of course Nexium performed better.

I spoke with an acquaintence who happened to be a drug rep for AstraZeneca, and one of his drugs had been Nexium. He told me that AstraZeneca had compared 40mg of Nexium to Prilosec, and the difference was so negligible that they simply suppressed it, and opted to publish the lobsided 20mg-40mg comparison. He also admitted that Nexium was only released because the patent on Prilosec was expiring.

Some other “me-too” drugs come readily to mind:

• Claritin (loratidine) and Clarinex (desloratidine)
• Celexa (citalopram) and Lexapro (escitalopram)
• Nexium (esomeprazole) and Prilosec (omeprazole)

Generally, these me-too drugs are released as a means to beat patent expiry, as I explained above. In the case of Claritin, not only was the patent expiring, but it went over-the-counter. Almost no insurance companies will pay for Clarinex because it’s so similar and doesn’t demonstrably work better.

Some of these “me-too” drugs are better in most cases without doctoring research findings. Lexapro, for instance, is more potent because only the S enantiomer has any effect in the body, so Forrest opted to remove the D component entirely — citalopram vs. escitalopram. The result is a drug with a lesser side effect profile, and a greater success rate. Nonetheless, it is also a “me-too” drug, and is more expensive than Celexa (for which a generic is now available).

Given everything I’ve said above, it should come as no surprise that these more expensive “me-too” drugs cost the medical industry money. Coupled with an effective marketing campaign — drug reps and direct-to-consumer advertising — patients clamor for the newer drugs, and doctors write for them. If I were a big pharmaceutical company, I’d probably do exactly what AstraZeneca and others have done, simply because it’s good for the bottom line, despite the fact that it contributes to the rising cost of health care in the United States.

the science and technology of building electronic circuits and devices from single atoms and molecules.

So when I read headlines like “Nanocoating could eliminate foggy windows and lenses” I immediately become skeptical, even when it’s an institution like MIT turning out the press release. The word “nanotechnology” is some sort of magnet for public attention, particularly among the geek crowd that is usually misused, often by people that should know better.

Anyway my mini-rant aside, researchers at MIT have developed a coating of “silica nanoparticles.” It’s not nanotechnology (save that it’s the right molecular size), but it is a fancy coating that will prevent windows from fogging. What’s special about this new coating is that it doesn’t have the shortcomings that other fogging solutions have: it doesn’t require UV light to function, nor does its effectiveness decrease over time. The approach to the fogging problem is pretty unique:

When fogging occurs, thousands of tiny water droplets condense on glass and other surfaces. The droplets scatter light in random patterns, causing the surfaces to become translucent or foggy. This often occurs when a cold surface suddenly comes into contact with warm, moist air.

The new coating prevents this process from occurring, primarily through its super-hydrophilic, or water-loving, nature, Rubner says. The nanoparticles in the coating strongly attract the water droplets and force them to form much smaller contact angles with the surface. As a result, the droplets flatten and merge into a uniform, transparent sheet rather than forming countless individual light-scattering spheres. “The coating basically causes water that hits the surfaces to develop a sustained sheeting effect, and that prevents fogging,” Rubner says.

I think drivers everywhere would love something like this, provided it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. (I know I would.) Two auto manufacturers are already interested in the technology, as is the US military.

Update: Kudos to New Scientist for not using any form of the word “nanotechnology” in their coverage.

In their design, a credit card-sized cartridge containing hydrogen-releasing pellets would drive a fuel cell that provides charge to batteries as they are depleted. The pellets consist of compounds that produce hydrogen when reacted with water; a computer chip can monitor how many of these pellets have been used up in a cartridge and signal when a replacement is needed. Best of all, these cartridges are not only extremely portable but disposable as well; the byproducts of the reactions utilized are environmentally friendly, so used-up cartridges can easily be discarded or recycled.

Besides the obvious application in portable devices for everyone from investment bankers to Marines, the inventors mention that their device may also be considered as safe energy source for hardware in future space vehicles. Evgeny Shafirovich, a scientist who worked on the project, states:

“The Apollo 13 accident was caused by an explosion involving liquid oxygen, which is needed along with liquid hydrogen to feed a fuel cell in spacecraft. Use of chemical mixtures, such as ours, for generation of hydrogen and oxygen would eliminate the possibility of such an explosion.”

And, of course, any technology than can spare NASA further problems is a good thing.

Allopathy, in a nutshell, is the practice of combating illness with opposites. If you have an infection, you are given an antibiotic. If you have cancer, you receive radiation or chemotherapy to kill the cancerous cells. Largely, these treatments work: people have longer life spans today than they did 100 or 200 years ago. We’ve come a long way in the study of medicine, but there are some things that medicine simply has no answer for. Or if there is an answer, it is not an optimal way of dealing with a medical condition. Witness things like oral steroids like prednisone and Medrol. Long-term use of these types of medications is not healthy, and often the side effects can be worse than the condition they’re being used to treat. The same is true of the myriad irritable bowel diseases like Crohn’s disease, various forms of colitis, etc: these diseases don’t have treatments that are especially effective without doing drastic things like suppressing the immune system or removing parts of the intestines.

For a long time, there has been an “alternative” movement in medicine. It has become popular in recent years, and the fact is, this school of thought has been around for quite a long time. These natural remedies are often looked down on by those in the medical profession, especially doctors. I think this is a mistake, for a number of reasons that I will expound upon in a moment. First, I want to explain the principle behind homeopathy.

Homeopathy essentially amounts to taking a substance that would normally cause irritation in the body, and diluting it many times over. The idea is that by diluting the substance and then introducing this diluted solution into the body, the body will be able to effectively combat whatever illness or irritant is ailing you. Basically, fighting like with like. This is the exact opposite of the traditional allopathic medicine that is mainstream today.

One of the allopaths’ arguments against homeopathy is that the substance is diluted so much, all that’s left is water. Contrary to “real” science, water molecules cannot “absorb” the properties of an irritant and still be water. It would be a water + something else solution. But all that’s present is this water, there is nothing else. So what you’ve got from a chemical point of view is water being used to treat everything from poison ivy to stomach cancer.

I stated in the very first post here on polyscience.org that I was a pharmacy student. As such, most of my schooling is done on the allopathic side of things. We study the drugs that are used today. Slowly, though, the curriculum is changing; we’re learning about herbs and probiotics and even homeopathy. In general, I prefer a good allopathic remedy that I know is going to work, but I hesitate to question the efficacy of alternative therapies for many reasons. Perhaps the most blindingly obvious one is that doctors, pharmacists, and even the drug companies simply don’t know why some drugs work. This is usually due to an incomplete understanding of the specific physiology underlying the body process that we’re trying to alter. It would seem reasonable to me, then, to not dismiss alternative medicines and therapies out of hand. One of these is homeopathy, despite it not making “scientific” sense. Relegated to the ignoble position of “placebo,” subject to ridicule from layperson and medical professional alike. But something being deemed “placebo” isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Any medical professional worth his salt will tell you that getting better is often simply a state of mind. “Simply,” of course, being anything but simple. Twenty years ago, it was not uncommon for a doctor to literally write a prescription for a placebo. The patient would then take this prescription to the pharmacy where it would be filled. The capsules dispensed were usually filled with lactose — a filling agent used to fill the extra space in a capsule for a custom-compounded medication. And the patients were happy, and usually got better. Not all the time, of course, but most of the time.

This brings me to the catalyst for this post. The Lancet is probably the most prestigious medical journal in the world, and recently they’ve once again shot down the benefits of homeopathic therapy. They might be right,I don’t know; it’s impossible to know, and the researchers have even acknowledged this.

Professor Egger said: “We acknowledge to prove a negative is impossible.

“But good large studies of homeopathy do not show a difference between the placebo and the homeopathic remedy, whereas in the case of conventional medicines you still see an effect.”

What I do know, however, is that given our incomplete understanding of the human body, dismissing all alternative therapies out of hand is a mistake, and I think that over the next 100 years, we allopaths will discover this. I’m not saying that homeopathy is effective or if it’s “just” the placebo effect, but I do think that we should continue to investigate “alternative” therapies — homeopathy included, even if it’s just to disprove their efficacy. Disproving something definitively is never a waste of time or money.