Dive Deep Into Episode 05 Of #ShelfLife To Discover The Various Technologies That Have Helped Humans

Scientists are pretty sure that deep inside the moon, there’s water

While Earth’s surface cracks and spouts fire, the moon’s surface, for as long as we’ve known it, has been quiet. 

The youngest sign of volcanic activity scientists have found on the moon’s surface is 18 million years old.

But the traces of that long-ago volcanic activity could help scientists crack an enduring mystery: How much water is on the moon?

A study published Monday in Nature Geoscience suggests it may be more than we thought. Read more (7/24/17)

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Blood is red, urine is yellow, and faeces are brown. Why? Chemistry*!  *Disclaimer: shout-outs to biology and physics too.

Separation of a highly fluorescent anthranilic acid derivative from the reaction mixture.

The upper organic layer dissolved almost completely my compound from the reaction mixture and could be separated in one step. A good point was that the compound had a really strong fluorescence and if I placed an UV lamp next to the separation funnel it was easily observed that the water phase contained almost none of the title compound. 

More ‪#‎WorldChocolateDay‬ chemistry: this time with C&EN, looking at dark chocolate, milk chocolate, and white ‘chocolate’: ow.ly/ugB93021z64

5 sleep disorders you didn’t know existed

Ever shouted at your partner while you slept, or woken up unable to move? From apnoea to exploding heads, here are some strange things that go bump in the night.

Sleep apnoea

A surprisingly common condition in which you stop breathing for 10 seconds or more as you sleep. The lack of oxygen causes your brain to wake you up, or pull you into much lighter sleep. Either way, it can have a profound effect on the quality of your sleep – and that of any bedfellow, as it’s often accompanied by loud snoring.

Sleep paralysis

A terrifying experience, where the body, which naturally becomes paralysed duringREM sleep, is still paralysed when you wake. You are fully conscious but cannot move or speak, sometimes for several minutes. Some people also feel as if they are choking or their chest is being crushed and they may have visual hallucinations. The condition can be exacerbated by sleep deprivation, some drugs, and disorders such as sleep apnoea.

Hypnagogic jerks

Those jumps or twitches you experience as you nod off, often accompanied by the sensation of falling. The cause remains a mystery. One idea is that you start dreaming before your body becomes paralysed. Another is that the twitches are a by-product of your nervous system relaxing as you drift off.

REM sleep disorder

If you’ve ever punched or shouted at your partner in the night, only to remember nothing next morning, you may have been in the grip of this condition. Here, the body isn’t fully paralysed during REM sleep, so people act out their dreams. Thistends to happen only with bad dreams.

Exploding head syndrome

This entails the sensation of a loud noise, like an exploding bomb or a gunshot, as you drift off or wake up. It affects about 1 in 10 of us and it tends to start around age 50. Nobody knows what causes it– perhaps physical changes in the middle ear, or a minor seizure in the brain’s temporal lobe. Despite its name, the condition is harmless.

Image Credit: Toby Leigh

Source: New Scientist (By Catherine de Lange)

Fungal tissues – the fungal mantle around the root tip and the fungal network of tendrils that penetrates the root of plants, or Hartig Net, between Pinus sylvestris plant root cells – in green. Ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi help trees tolerate drought and boost the productivity of bioenergy feedstock trees, including poplar and willow.

Via Berkeley Lab: The sclerotia are in the soil!

More: How Fungi Help Trees Tolerate Drought (Joint Genome Institute)

Organic Chemistry, Part 2/6

Reaction Mechanisms: Electrophilic addition to double bonds, SN2, SN1, E1, E2, and the decision tree

Next week: EAS, NAS, pericyclic reactions, Claisen rearrangements, and radical reactions!

Part 1

Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?

Carl Sagan

Antibody Therapy Creates New Opportunities For Treating Brain Diseases

Immunotherapy has proven to be effective against many serious diseases. But to treat diseases in the brain, the antibodies must first get past the obstacle of the blood-brain barrier. In a new study, a research group at Uppsala University describes their development of a new antibody design that increases brain uptake of antibodies almost 100-fold.

Immunotherapy entails treatment with antibodies; it is the fastest growing field in pharmaceutical development. In recent years, immunotherapy has successfully been used to treat cancer and rheumatoid arthritis, and the results of clinical studies look very promising for several other diseases. Antibodies are unique in that they can be modified to strongly bind to almost any disease-causing protein. In other words, major potential exists for new antibody-based medicines.

The problem with immunotherapy for diseases affecting the brain is that the brain is protected by a very tight layer of cells, called the blood-brain barrier. The blood-brain barrier effectively prevents large molecules, such as antibodies, from passing from the bloodstream into the brain. It has therefore been difficult to use immunotherapy to treat Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, which affect the brain, as well as cancerous tumours in the brain.

It has been known for a long time that some large proteins are actively transported across the blood-brain barrier. These include a protein called transferrin, whose primary task is to bind to iron in the blood and then transport it to the brain. The research group behind this new study has taken advantage of this process and modified the antibodies they want to transport into the brain using components that bind to the transferrin receptor. Then, like a Trojan horse, the receptor transports antibodies into the brain. The number of modifications to and placement of the antibodies have proven to be important factors for making this process as effective as possible.

“Bivalent Brain Shuttle Increases Antibody Uptake by Monovalent Binding to the Transferrin Receptor” by Greta Hultqvist, Stina Syvänen, Xiaotian T Fang, Lars Lannfelt, and Dag Sehlin in Theranostics. Published online January 2017 doi:10.7150/thno.17155

The green antibody is modified using two components that bind to the transferrin receptor and enable the antibody to pass through the blood-brain barrier. The components are placed in such a way that prevents them from being able to bind simultaneously. The placement is important, because otherwise the antibody would not detach on the far side of the blood-brain barrier. NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Greta Hultqvist.

A special organic dye, Nile Red in different solvents.

From left to right I dissolved equal amounts of Nile Red (a dye) in different solvents. The solvents were: methanol, diisopropyl ether, hexane, n-propanol, tetrahydrofuran, toluene, ethanol, acetone.

Depending on the solvents polarity, the dye dissolved to give different colored solutions (upper image), this is called solvatochromism. It is the ability of a chemical substance to change color due to a change in solvent polarity.

Under UV light, these solutions emitted different colors (bottom pics), this is called solvatofluorescence. The emission and excitation wavelength both shift depending on solvent polarity, so it fluoresces with different color depending on the solvent what it’s dissolved in.

Nile Red is a quite expensive dye, which costs a bit over 1000 USD/gram, therefore I had to make it. The purification of the raw material was posted HERE. 

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