Ms. Martin-Ventura's Chemistry Class

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

Truth in advertising is a questionable concept, because it’s often self-serving to lie. Whether you’re talking about a used car salesman or a poisonous snake. No, they’re not the same thing. [More]

If you thought you were eating mostly grass-fed beef when you bit into a Big Mac, think again: The bulk of a fast-food hamburger from McDonald's, Burger King or Wendy's is made from cows that eat primarily corn, or so says a new study of the chemical composition of more than 480 fast-food burgers from across the nation.

And it isn't only cows that are eating corn. There is also evidence of a corn diet in chicken sandwiches, and even French fries get a good slathering of the fat that makes them so tasty from being fried in corn oil.

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

They say that the best offense is a good defense. And the best defense might be the most offensive. Take, for example, the barfing caterpillars of the beet armyworm moth. When threatened by marauding fire ants, these caterpillars regurgitate on their foes, rendering them less able to put up a fight. But what’s so debilitating about a little caterpillar puke? Scientists used to think that bugs that protect themselves by projectile vomiting were taking advantage of chemicals they borrowed from the plants they eat--essentially spitting plant toxins at their enemies. But the beet armyworm will eat almost anything, from cauliflower to corn, and most of those plants don’t produce anything that can be weaponized. [More]

The cyberpunk science fiction that emerged in the 1980s routinely paraded “neural implants” for hooking a computing device directly to the brain: “I had hundreds of megabytes stashed in my head,” proclaimed the protagonist of “Johnny Mnemonic,” a William Gibson story that later became a wholly forgettable movie starring Keanu Reeves.

The genius of the then emergent genre (back in the days when a megabyte could still wow) was its juxtaposition of low-life retro culture with technology that seemed only barely beyond the capabilities of the deftest biomedical engineer. Although the implants could not have been replicated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the California Institute of Technology, the best cyberpunk authors gave the impression that these inventions might yet materialize one day, perhaps even in the reader’s own lifetime.

His finalist year: 1961 [More]

Nature has conjured up numerous defenses to water, imbuing duck feathers, lotus leaves and even butterfly wings with the ability to repel that ubiquitous liquid of life. But it hasn't had much time to come up with a way to protect its constituents against a newcomer like gasoline. [More]

As the Federal Bureau of Investigation was about to move in, U.S. Army biodefense scientist Bruce Ivins committed suicide, thus possibly closing the chapter on the first--and so far only--fatal bioattack in U.S. history. The FBI alleges that Ivins, who worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Md., mailed anthrax-laden letters in September and October 2001 that killed five people. The incidents sparked a massive infusion of research funds to counter civilian bioterrorism, $41 billion spread over seven federal departments and agencies. Yet some observers argue that those funds have done little to guard against another bioterror incident, especially if the FBI is right about Ivins.

In an opinion that echoes those of several public health scientists, Keith Rhodes, the Government Accountability Office’s chief technologist, told a congressional hearing in October 2007 that “we are at greater risk today” than before of an infectious disease epidemic because of the great increase in biolaboratories and the absence of oversight they receive. In the past six years, says Rutgers University microbiologist Richard Ebright, “the Bush administration has driven a 20- to 30-fold increase in the number of institutions and individuals with access to live, virulent bioweapons agents,” to about 400 institutions and 15,000 people. Every one of them, he claims, “is a potential source of an attack like the 2001 attack.” Even before the expansion, some 100 scientists had access to the anthrax strain Ivins managed. Moreover, huge growth “multiplies the chance of an accidental release,” argues Hillel Cohen, an epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it is also in the eye of a honeybee, the eggs of a lobster and the surface of petrified wood--as is evident from a selection of images entered in the 2008 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition. In its fifth year, the competition honors superior images of living organisms or their components attained with the help of light microscopy.

The judges chose 10 winners and awarded honorable mention to many others, evaluating entries based on the scientific value of the images, aesthetics and the difficulty of capturing the information displayed. This year, as in the past, competitors were free to bring out specific features through pseudo-coloring and other computer enhancements.

From a modern chemist’s perspective, the structure of DNA in our genes is rather mundane. The molecule has a well-known importance for life, but chemists often see only a uniform double helix with almost no functional behavior on its own. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that this molecule is the basis of a truly rich and strange research area that bridges synthetic chemistry, enzymology, structural nanotechnology and computer science.

Using this new science, we have constructed molecular versions of logic gates that can operate in water solution. Our goal in building these DNA-based computing modules is to develop nanoscopic machines that could exist in living organisms, sensing conditions and making decisions based on what they sense, then responding with actions such as releasing medicine or killing specific cells.

Quantum Ten: A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Ambition, and Scienceby Sheilla Jones. Oxford University Press, 2008