Always Have Ice

Happy ‪#‎CincoDeMayo‬! Here’s some avocado science to mark the occasion: http://wp.me/p4aPLT-p9

Here is a very quick video of my space pin painting progress! 

Sorry for the weird angle, I took this on my phone and i don’t have a proper stand for it yet lmao 

what do you think about chemical weapons and the use those weapons had against humanity? how do you feel about something as great as chemistry being used for such horrible things?

I’m sorry I just found this message buried in my inbox, so I don’t know when I received it.Short answer: Use chemistry for good. War bad. Chemical based war very bad. Be nice to other humans. Be nice to chemistry 

I originally started making this material not necessarily for armors but more for cars and trains. [I wanted it] to squeeze like a sponge, but in a heavy duty kind of form of a sponge so we could put it in front of the car or a high speed train and take care of the impact. But when we saw the performance of the material, we started thinking about ballistics and bullets. And so I tested those and we saw that…the material can perform.

Afsaneh Rabiei. He developed a metal foam that is lightweight, strong, heat- and radiation-resistant, and, when incorporated in a bulletproof vest, for example, capable of shattering bullets on impact without injuring the person wearing it.

(via sciencefriday)

Copper essential for burning fat, researchers find             

Though small amounts of copper are essential to health - oysters, liver, beans and nuts are good sources - copper’s role in metabolism has been unclear: Some studies found that it boosted fat burning, others that it depressed it.

University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have now clarified the critical role that copper plays in nutrition: It helps move fat out of fat cells - called adipocytes - and into the blood stream for use as energy.

Without enough copper, fat builds up in fat cells without being utilized, said Christopher Chang, the Class of 1942 Chair and a professor of chemistry and of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley.

“Unlike other studies that link copper levels both to increased or decreased fat metabolism, our study shows definitively how it works - it’s a signal that turns on fat cells,” said Chang, who also is a faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “If we could find a way to burn fat more efficiently, this could be a big contribution to dealing with obesity and diabetes.”

The new study appeared online this week, and will be published in the July print issue of the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

“Copper regulates cyclic-AMP-dependent lipolysis” by Lakshmi Krishnamoorthy, Joseph A Cotruvo Jr, Jefferson Chan, Harini Kaluarachchi, Abigael Muchenditsi, Venkata S Pendyala, Shang Jia, Allegra T Aron, Cheri M Ackerman, Mark N Vander Wal, Timothy Guan, Lukas P Smaga, Samouil L Farhi, Elizabeth J New, Svetlana Lutsenko and Christopher J Chang in Nature Chemical Biology. Published online June 6 2016 doi:10.1038/nchembio.2098

Caption: The crystal structure of the cAMP-degrading enzyme phosphodiesterase PDE3B, showing two magnesium atoms (green) in the active site. Copper binds one of the amino acid residues in the pink loop at the left, blocking the activity of the enzyme. Credit: Lakshmipriya Krishnamoorthy and Joseph Cotruvo Jr., UC Berkeley

This is very cool and a pretty big deal. Find out why.

Finally! Something was made what is a critical compound during the production of a quite special amino acid. 

The fun part with this was, that I tried nearly 20 methods to obtain this compound, and all of them failed. At last I tried a Chinese recipe what said that the product will be something that could be easily converted to my molecule, but instead of that compound I got the compound what I need out from the reaction. Better news: 90% isolated yield! 

Despite its appearance, there is order in the chaos of turbulence. These snapshots from a turbulent channel flow simulation outline these coherent structures in black. The top photo shows a top view looking down on the channel and the bottom image shows a side view of the channel. It is thought that studying these coherent structures may help shed light on turbulence and its formation, which remains one of the great open questions of classical physics. (Photo credit: M. Green)