For Your Viewing Pleasure

As I've said before, and will probably say again, I've always been fascinated by the workings of our universe and the magnificence of space. I try to make it over to NASA's website to check out their Image of the Day Gallery once in a while, and I'm always amazed at how awesome the featured pictures are.

Today, I ran across this article at Wired Science. A Rice University researcher took 14 years of images of high-energy jets released from forming stars from the Hubble Space Telescope and pieced them together into a series of seamless animations. The result? I would call it staggering, eerie, beautiful. But you're welcome to come up with your own adjectives.

The video below includes a small selection of the animations. The rest can be found here.

Seeing Red, In More Ways Than One

As the co-owner of a small high-tech business, Emergent Sensor Technologies (EST), I have a vested interest in the federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, and to a lesser degree, the Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) program. These programs were originally designed to give small businesses kick-start funding to pursue highly advanced and innovative research projects that might be too risky to undertake otherwise. The end goal of the program? To create jobs. And this makes a lot of sense considering national job growth is fueled almost solely by small businesses. In fact, when EST is awarded its first SBIR, we plan to hire new employees nearly immediately, with additional employees to be added within 1.5-2 years after the date of the award.

Unfortunately, the SBIR program, like many other federal science-related programs, is on the chopping block. According to Rick Shindell of SBIR Insider,

The news on SBIR reauthorization is not good. In fact, at this time, the odds for obtaining reauthorization by the September 30, 2011 deadline is grim, and congress seems to have no taste for what would be the 13th continuing resolution (CR or extender) of the program. In short, the SBIR/STTR programs are likely to lapse, at least for a time, but perhaps permanently.

I don't think I should have to state explicitly that this is an utter travesty, but I'm going to anyways: This is an utter travesty.

It's become clear that in Washington, D.C., job growth and economic development has taken a back seat to deficit reduction. This, despite high unemployment and a depressed economy for the foreseeable future. It's a shame that balancing our federal budget, a matter which has very little effect on the majority of Americans, is being touted as some sort of pressing problem, all at the expense of our country's future. It shows a real lack of foresight and vision. And it's paving the way for us to be overcome as the world's most powerful nation, leaving us whimpering and grabbing at China's coattails.

You Say Scientific Reference, I Say Reprobate

As an avid bicyclist, bicycle aficionado, and all-around bike-lover, I have a great respect for the bicycle helmet. Beyond general self-awareness and following the rules of the road, the bicycle helmet is one of the few ways a cyclist can help ensure his or her own safety. That's why I was taken aback when I came across a supposed bicycle advocacy website that purposefully denounced the use of helmets, citing their "scientific reference on helmets." Their reference is for the so-called 'Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation.' I should warn you that, should you decide to visit this reference website, your head might explode due to the sheer volume of stupid that will be racing over the internet directly into your brain.

Here's what the 'research institute' is all about. They've compiled a bunch of research studies that show that bicycle helmets make cyclists safer. They take these studies and tear them apart, looking for any gaps or holes that can be used to decry the findings and conclusions of the study. Then they look at a bunch research studies that show that helmet-wearing cyclists are not statistically significantly safer than non-helmeted cyclists, which they take as gospel. This is, of course, because these studies back the conclusion that they had obviously settled upon beforehand: helmets may or may not make bicyclists safer, so no one should use them.

Basically the authors have decided that they don't like helmets, so they dig up a bunch of literature to justify themselves, often failing to understand or purposefully misconstruing the conclusions of the papers that they've cited. I should probably be a little more fair and honest about this; the authors are actually against mandatory bicycle helmet legislation. No matter their underlying goals, though, it really is quite despicable.

How about this instead: Helmet use has been estimated to reduce head injury risk by 85 percent, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). Oh and by the way, I'd say the biggest difference between the IIHS and these turds who run the anti-helmet website is that the IIHS isn't made up of a bunch of quacks trying to come to a preconceived conclusion.

Overall, the website reminded me a lot of the websites of climate change skeptics. Obviously subjective and including only the evidence required to illuminate their own narrow viewpoint. And I think it's rather pathetic that this is what these people have devoted their time to. Not wearing bicycle helmets seems to have caused them to take a few too many blows to the head, if you know what I mean. But I guess we're all entitled to our point of view, no matter how idiotic it may be.

Toot My Horn

My most recent manuscript submission has been published online. As I promised in a previous post to link to the paper on my blog, you can find the article here (probably requires a subscription). This paper doesn't include any mind-blowing discoveries, so I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time hashing out all the details of the study. But here's a brief picture of what was done...

The paper is titled, "Comparison of molecular imprinted particles prepared using precipitation polymerization in water and chloroform for fluorescent detection of nitroaromatics." First off, I've described the process of molecular imprinting and how the molecular imprinted polymers work; you can find this information here if you'd like to know more. In essence, a molecularly imprinted polymer is a plastic material that starts as a liquid-phase precursor solution containing the template molecule that you want to imprint. When the material polymerizes, creating a rigid solid, the template is physically and chemically bound within the material. A chemical extraction process is then used to remove the template molecules within the material. This leaves behind binding sites in the polymer that, when re-exposed to the template, are able to specifically rebind the molecule. In this case, I used two different template molecules, TNT (the explosive) and its little brother DNT. Both of these compounds are nitroaromatics and are important in the detection of bombs, IEDs, landmines, etc.

For this study, I prepared the imprinted polymer particles using precipitation polymerization. In precipitation polymerization, the liquid precursor of the imprinted polymer contains an excess of solvent. When there is enough solvent, one section of forming polymer in the solution is unable to link up to another forming section of polymer in the solution because of all the solvent that is between them. Because of this, discrete particles of imprinted polymer are formed within the solution.

The selection of what type of solvent to use for this process is very important, as it determines how effectively the imprinted polymer binding sites will bind to the template molecule. In previous work, I experimentally determined that chloroform was the best solvent for imprinting nitroaromatic molecules. But here's the catch: molecularly imprinted polymers bind the template molecule best when they are exposed to the molecule in the same solvent that was used to form the imprinted polymer, and I wanted to expose the imprinted polymer to the template molecule in a water environment. So there's a trade-off going on. On the one hand, I already knew that chloroform was the most effective solvent for imprinting. But on the other hand, water would be the ideal solvent if I planned to expose the imprinted polymer to the template in water.

So I set out to compare the two solvents, chloroform and water, but a funny thing happened along the way. I used scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images to look at the polymer particles and found that they were nothing alike. In the image below, (a) is the SEM of the particles produced in chloroform and (b) is of the particles produced in water. The images showed us that not only was the chemistry of the two polymers different because of the solvents, but the entire morphology was different as well.

To test which polymer would bind the TNT and DNT templates best, I doped the imprinted polymer particles with a fluorescent dye. When the template bound to the binding sites of the imprinted polymer, it would then quench the fluorescence of nearby dye molecules, which could be detected using a spectrometer. By carefully analyzing the data from these studies, I found that chloroform was the most effective solvent. This meant that the increased imprinting efficiency of the chloroform-based polymer was more important than using the same solvent for polymerization and rebinding. These results weren't much of a surprise, but they could be very beneficial for other researchers working in this field, as they can now refer to my paper rather than conducting this fairly time-consuming study on their own.

Not Exactly Robot Overlords, But Still...

Some of you may have already come across this, because it's making big news. But researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have developed what they are calling 'self-assembled colloidal asters.' You can check out the abstract here, but the full article is available by subscription only. These colloidal asters are essentially little micro-robots. They are manipulated with a magnetic field and can perform simple tasks as a cohesive group of colloid particles. If you're interested, I recommend reading Wired Science's article on this, which also includes some pretty cool videos of the little dudes in action.

Today's Vocabulary Word: Theory

I'm going to go ahead and essentially plagiarize an entire post from one of my new favorite blogs, The Evolving Scientist. I even stole one of the images from their post! Last month, they addressed an issue that has been close to my heart since I was a fledgeling scientist, beating my head against the wall trying to explain evolution by natural selection to the church kids on the school bus. And that issue is the definition of a scientific theory.

I'm not going to rehash their entire post, because they've done an outstanding job of explaining what a theory is and how it is different from a law, as well as how a theory is different from the layman's common definition. But the difference between scientific theory and law is summed up nicely by the image above. A theory is not an educated guess, as many believe (that would be a hypothesis). Instead, a theory is defined (by the Oxford English Dictionary) as 'a scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena.' In simple terms, a theory is used to explain a set of often complex observations. A law, on the other hand, is a description of an observation, and is often used as a predictive measure when certain conditions exist.


These ideas are, more or less, part of the scientific method, in which observations are used to verify hypotheses and generate scientific theories, thus increasing our understanding of the world around us. This process was spelled out by Francis Bacon in 1620, in one of the greatest works ever written, Novum Organum Scientarium. PZ Myers has a phenomenal post on his blog, Pharyngula, that discusses Novum Organum and its place as a marvelous triumph in human history. If you feel like being inspired by science and our quest for knowledge, it's required reading.

Piece By Tiny Little Piece

A quick update before heading off to a meeting: the old lab refrigerator - the one with the Natural Light in it - has been hauled out of the lab by the LU Facilities guys. That freed up a lot of space in the laboratory and got rid of a pretty wretched eyesore. Unfortunately, the old calorimeter is still there. They weren't able to take it along with the fridge because it is still connected to the water supply. This means we'll have to wait for the plumber to come disconnect the instrument, then we'll have to wait for the Facilities guys to come back to pick it up. So it may be there for a while longer.

We're also waiting to have an old non-functional floor centrifuge picked up. The centrifuge is in a lab in the basement. Once they've hauled it away, we're going to move the functional centrifuge that's currently in our lab down to take the old one's place. Then we'll be putting the new refrigerator in the space left by the centrifuge.

After all this is done, it's going to look pretty awesome in the new lab. Everything will be arranged very efficiently and we'll have lots of extra space on the bench top for all of the equipment that has been ordered or will be ordered in the near future.

Speaking of equipment, I also moved our spectrofluorometer up into the lab from downstairs. This is a pretty big deal since it's the instrument that we use most often for fluorescence measurements. It wasn't easy, since the fluorometer is a pretty big unit - taking up most of the bench that it now sits on. I had to break the instrument itself in half and carry it up into the lab on a cart. Then I had to bring up all of the drivers and amplifiers and other peripheral equipment that runs the machine. It's a fairly delicate and complicated instrument, so it took me some time to get it put back together and hooked up properly, but it's going to be nice to have it in our lab where it will be easily accessible. It was starting to become a real pain in the ass to prepare the samples in the new lab, then carry them downstairs to the old lab to take the measurements.