#Chemical Sciences Journal

[chemicalscience-crimson]

Advanced Nanomaterials as UV Photocatalysts for IAQ Monitoring_Crimson Publishers

Abstract

Nowadays, indoor air pollution has emerged as a major health concern for the indoor living population. UV photocatalytic indoor air cleansing has been found to be a promising technology. Effective UV photocatalysts have been applied to monitor/control the indoor air quality (IAQ) level. The nanomaterials based on nanocarbons, polymers, and nanoparticles have been applied in the UV photocatalysts. Indoor pollutants including gaseous pollutants, organic compounds, and biological pollutants have been removed using photocatalytic technology. Basically, nanomaterials act to degrade the environmental pollutants into environmentally safe forms, i.e., least hazardous for human health and maintain the IAQ level. Accordingly, through the use of nanomaterial-based UV photocatalysts, future solutions linking the IAQ regulation to the novel nanomaterials have been achieved.

Read more about this article: https://crimsonpublishers.com/acsr/fulltext/ACSR.000567.php

For more articles in our journal: https://crimsonpublishers.com/acsr/

[othmeralia]

Environmental Activism in Print

In the mid-1950’s a group of scientists, doctors, community members, and women activists based in St. Louis, Missouri became increasingly concerned about the health effects of atomic testing and fallout so they created a group called the Committee for Nuclear Information. They realized that the public did not have full and accurate information about the risks and decided that the creation of a magazine was their best chance of making a difference to inform the public. The magazine started in 1958 with the title Nuclear Information. After the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963 the group decided to shift their focus to more general environmental issues and changed title of the magazine to Scientist and Citizen and the name of their group to Scientists' Institute for Public Information.  The magazine changed names again to Environment in 1969 to 1997.  This magazine is extraordinary for its time because its purpose was to use the scientists as conduits of information to the public supposedly without political bias.

We have issues from 1969 to 1997. Environment

There's a great chapter on the creation of this activist committee in the book Disrupting Science by Kelly Moore.

[mvshortcut]

Ok so. Curtain definitely had Tai Li's parents killed right. like. do we agree on this

[petrochemicalscience]

A Mini-Review on CO2 Reforming of Methane_Crimson Publishers

Abstract:

The reforming of methane is considered as one of the industrially important processes for decades, as the process converts natural gas to valuable syngas (a mixture of H2 and CO). There are three major reforming processes, which are classified based on the energetic of the process and reforming agent. Catalytic steam reforming (endothermic reaction), partial oxidation (exothermic reaction) and auto thermal reforming (combined exothermic and endothermic reactions) of methane are commercially available processes for syngas production. Carbon dioxide/dry reforming (endothermic reaction) is another alternative process that has received significant attention in recent years, which demonstrates the environmental benefit. This is a mini review on the development of CO2 reforming of methane.

Read More About this Article: https://crimsonpublishers.com/pps/fulltext/PPS.000532.php

Read More Articles: https://crimsonpublishers.com/pps/index.php

[professionalowl]

so. um. the good news is we found your boyfriend. the bad news is that, well, we sort of…dug him up…in the middle of a car park. in leicester (buckley et al. 2013). leicester, yeah. sorry. they demolished the friary he was hastily interred in when henry viii dissolved all the monasteries. you know how it is. and as it turns out, well, shakespeare was…sort of right about him. scoliosis, yeah, sorry (appleby et al. 2014). if it makes you feel any better we analysed his bones and it turns out he had a pretty high-protein diet before he died (lamb et al. 2014). and he drank so much wine that it changed their chemical composition, which we didn't know could actually happen before we analysed him (lamb et al. 2014), so he was having a good time, at least. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appleby, J., Mitchell, P.D., Robinson, C., Brough, A., Rutty, G., and Morgan, B. (2014). The scoliosis of Richard III, last Plantagenet King of England: diagnosis and clinical significance. Lancet 383, 1944. 

Buckley, R., Morris, M., Appleby, J., King, T., O’Sullivan, D., and Foxhall, L. (2013). ‘The king in the car park’: new light on the death and burial of Richard III in the Grey Friars church, Leicester, in 1485. Antiquity 87, pp. 519-538. 

Lamb, A.L., Evans, J.E., Buckley, R., and Appleby, J. (2014). Multi-isotope analysis demonstrates significant lifestyle changes in King Richard III. Journal of Archaeological Science 50, pp. 559-565.

[rjzimmerman]

Surprising New Research Links Infant Mortality to Crashing Bat Populations. (New York Times)

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

The connections are commonsense but the conclusion is shocking.

Bats eat insects. When a fatal disease hit bats, farmers used more pesticides to protect crops. And that, according to a new study, led to an increase in infant mortality.

According to the research, published Thursday in the journal Science, farmers in affected U.S. counties increased their use of insecticides by 31 percent when bat populations declined. In those places, infant mortality rose by an estimated 8 percent.

“It’s a seminal piece,” said Carmen Messerlian, a reproductive epidemiologist at Harvard who was not involved with the research. “I actually think it’s groundbreaking.”

The new study tested various alternatives to see if something else could have driven the increase: Unemployment or drug overdoses, for example. Nothing else was found to cause it.

Dr. Messerlian, who studies how the environment affects fertility, pregnancy and child health, said a growing body of research is showing health effects from toxic chemicals in our environment, even if scientists can’t put their fingers on the causal links.

“If we were to reduce the population-level exposure today, we would save lives,” she said. “It’s as easy as that.”

The new study is the latest to find dire consequences for humans when ecosystems are thrown out of balance. Recent research by the same author, Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago, found that a die-off of vultures in India had led to half a million excess human deaths as rotting livestock carcasses polluted water and spurred an increase in feral dogs, spreading waterborne diseases and rabies.

“We often pay a lot of attention to global extinctions, where species completely disappear,” Dr. Frank said. “But we start experiencing loss and damages well before that.”

[xtruss]

Scientists Map How Mental Illness Changes Your Brain

— By Robyn White | August 14,2023

An artist's representative of Bipolar Disorder. In a new study, scientists mapped changes in individuals' brains to see how they differed with mental illnesses. Nataliia Prachova/Getty Images

Scientists have discovered how the brain changes and differs due to different mental health issues.

A brain mapping project undertaken by researchers at Australia's Monash University's Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health and School of Psychological Sciences, assessed nearly 1,300 people with six different types of mental illness.

By measuring volume and size of 1,000 different brain regions, they found "extraordinary diversity" in brain changes in people with schizophrenia or major depression, the study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience stated.

This means that treating mental illnesses may be more effective when focusing on an individual's brain, rather than group averages.

"Over the past few decades, researchers have mapped brain areas showing reduced volume in people diagnosed with a wide variety of mental illness, but this work has largely focused on group averages, which makes it difficult to understand what is happening in the brains of individual people" Ph.D. student Ashlea Segal, who led the research, said in a statement.

"For example, knowing that the average height of the Australian population is about 1.7 m tells me very little about the height of my next-door neighbour," she said.

Researchers analyzed regions of the brain showing unusually small or large volumes in people diagnosed with mental illnesses, including depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or autism spectrum disorder.

"We confirmed earlier findings that the specific brain regions showing large deviations in brain volume vary a lot across individuals, with no more than 7% of people with the same diagnosis showing a major deviation in the same brain area," Professor Alex Fornito, who led the research team, said in the statement.

"This result means that it is difficult to pinpoint treatment targets or causal mechanisms by focusing on group averages alone. It may also explain why people with the same diagnosis show wide variability in their symptom profiles and treatment outcomes."

The research may explain why two people with the same mental illness may have more symptoms in common than two people with two different illnesses.

"Because the brain is a network, dysfunction in one area can spread to affect other, connected sites. We found that, while deviations occurred in distinct brain regions across different people, they were often connected to common upstream or downstream areas, meaning they aggregated within the same brain circuits," Segal said.

These findings will help inform future treatment routes for those with mental illnesses in the future.

Research into mental illnesses is vital in determining which treatments are most effective. In recent years, mental illness research has progressed, though arguably slower than studies of other health conditions.

Mental illnesses can have severe impacts on a person's day to day life. Schizophrenia, for example, is a condition that effects a person's ability to think or behave, often manifesting in delusions, or behavior that seems out of touch with reality, according to the Mayo Clinic.

But the exact cause of schizophrenia is not yet known. Scientists believe a combination of brain chemistry, structure, as well as genetics may be involved.

Depression also does not have a single cause. It may be caused by external factors in ones life, such as a stressful or upsetting life event, but scientists also believe it can manifest from chemical imbalances in the brain.

There is also evidence that mental illness runs in families, suggesting genes may be involved.

"We found that certain specific brain circuits were preferentially involved in some disorders, suggesting that they are potential treatment targets" Segal said.

"However, our findings suggest that these targets will only be appropriate for a subset of people. For instance, we found evidence that brain circuits linked to frontal areas were preferentially involved in depression. These circuits are commonly used as targets for non-invasive brain stimulation therapies, but our data suggest that they may only effective targets for around 1/3 of people."

The framework developed by these scientists opens new doors into mapping brain deviations in those with mental illnesses.

"The framework we have developed allows us to understand the diversity of brain changes in people with mental illness at different levels, from individual regions through to more widespread brain circuits and networks, offering a deeper insight into how the brain is affected in individual people," Fornito said.

[mindblowingscience]

Volcanoes were still erupting on the moon when dinosaurs roamed Earth, new research suggests. The evidence: three tiny glass beads plucked from the surface of the moon and brought to Earth in 2020 by a Chinese spacecraft. Their chemical makeup indicates that there were active lunar volcanoes until about 120 million years ago, much more recent than scientists thought. An earlier analysis of the rock samples from the Chang'e 5 mission had suggested volcanoes petered out 2 billion years ago. Previous estimates stretched back to 4 billion years ago. The research was published Thursday in the journal Science.

Continue Reading.

[cosmicpuzzle]

Which Education🎓📚 is right for you?

Mercury rules your interest and consequently which type of course you would select.

Now you have to see how Mercury is placed. For example if Mercury is conjunct Moon it would have same effect as Mercury in Cancer or Moon opposite Mercury.

Mercury -Sun: It is called Budh Aditya yoga. These people can shine in political science, geology, sociology, medicine and they can be good leaders too. They may prepare for competitive exams.

Mercury-Moon: Some changes or confusion in choice of course. Can study more than one subject but both vastly different from each other. Chemical, hotel management, nutrition, chef, psychology, tarot and intuitive studies.

Mercury-Mars: Some obstacles in education, breaks and interruptions (dropping classes), engineering (especially related to machines, drawings, plans, civil, electronics), medicine (especially related to surgery), fire and safety engineering,

Mercury-Venus: Sales, marketing, HR, interior designing, makeup courses, all type of fine arts, vocational courses, acting courses.

Mercury-Saturn: Engineering (like construction , petroleum, mining core subjects), structural engineering, drafting, administrative studies.

Mercury-Jupiter: Finance, CPA, CMA, accounting, teaching, law field, journalism, VJ, pilots, aeronautical.

Mercury- Rahu: Chemical, nuclear subjects, cinematography, software courses, digital marketing, share markets, computer hardware, import export, AI, Machine Learning courses.

Mercury-Ketu: Computer coding, electrical engineering, bio technology, astrology, virology, research oriented fields.

For Readings DM

[reasonsforhope]

"A team at Northwestern University has come up with the term “dancing molecules” to describe an invention of synthetic nanofibers which they say have the potential to quicken the regeneration of cartilage damage beyond what our body is capable of.

The moniker was coined back in November 2021, when the same team introduced an injection of these molecules to repair tissues and reverse paralysis after severe spinal cord injuries in mice.

Now they’ve applied the same therapeutic strategy to damaged human cartilage cells. In a new study, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the treatment activated the gene expression necessary to regenerate cartilage within just four hours.

And, after only three days, the human cells produced protein components needed for cartilage regeneration, something humans can’t do in adulthood.

The conceptual mechanisms of the dancing molecules work through cellular receptors located on the exterior of the cell membrane. These receptors are the gateways for thousands of compounds that run a myriad of processes in biology, but they exist in dense crowds constantly moving about on the cell membrane.

The dancing molecules quickly form synthetic nanofibers that move according to their chemical structure. They mimic the extracellular matrix of the surrounding tissue, and by ‘dancing’ these fibers can keep up with the movement of the cell receptors. By adding biological signaling receptors, the whole assemblage can functionally move and communicate with cells like natural biology.

“Cellular receptors constantly move around,” said Northwestern Professor of Materials Sciences Samuel Stupp, who led the study. “By making our molecules move, ‘dance’ or even leap temporarily out of these structures, known as supramolecular polymers, they are able to connect more effectively with receptors.”

The target of their work is the nearly 530 million people around the globe living with osteoarthritis, a degenerative disease in which tissues in joints break down over time, resulting in one of the most common forms of morbidity and disability.

“Current treatments aim to slow disease progression or postpone inevitable joint replacement,” Stupp said. “There are no regenerative options because humans do not have an inherent capacity to regenerate cartilage in adulthood.”

In the new study, Stupp and his team looked to the receptors for a specific protein critical for cartilage formation and maintenance. To target this receptor, the team developed a new circular peptide that mimics the bioactive signal of the protein, which is called transforming growth factor beta-1 (TGFb-1).

Northwestern U. Press then reported that the researchers incorporated this peptide into two different molecules that interact to form supramolecular polymers in water, each with the same ability to mimic TGFb-1...

“With the success of the study in human cartilage cells, we predict that cartilage regeneration will be greatly enhanced when used in highly translational pre-clinical models,” Stupp said. “It should develop into a novel bioactive material for regeneration of cartilage tissue in joints.”

“We are beginning to see the tremendous breadth of conditions that this fundamental discovery on ‘dancing molecules’ could apply to,” Stupp said. “Controlling supramolecular motion through chemical design appears to be a powerful tool to increase efficacy for a range of regenerative therapies.”"

-via Good News Network, August 5, 2024

[ms-demeanor]

Ma'am, I must inform you that I may have fallen in love with you for your knowledge of nutrition. I haven't studied it in an official academic setting or anything, but I've had food and nutrition as a special interest for years despite having frankly severe ARFID.

I also want to tell you about the food YouTuber Adam Ragusa, because I think you might enjoy watching his videos. He's got a background in journalism and on his channel he covers not only a bunch of really cool recipes, but has a lot of really in-depth videos on certain things about food all the way from etymology, to ethics of certain foods and diets, to debunking fad diet and trends, to molecular and functional explanations of both nutritional elements and how certain culinary concepts work. I swear to god I'm not a spambot, I just found the gold mine for my special interest and seeing you go on a wall-o-text explanation regarding nutrition made me turn into an unskippable cutscene.

Hi! Hi! I went back to school to study nutrition (which fell through after two years, but gave me two years of classes at least) after having a shitty, shitty time with my doctor and my celiac and my food allergies. It's not possible right now for me to continue studying it academically (life, work, in person classes, money, etc) but it is still something I'm interested in and read a lot about and am always looking for more classes on.

I quite like Adam Ragusa - my spouse watches him a lot and I find his videos interesting and entertaining. In case you haven't seen her channel, I'm going to recommend Ann Reardon, who is a food scientist youtuber who does a lot of debunking videos about bad cooking science, though she's more on the "how do these foods work together as chemicals" end of things than the nutrition end of things.

Thank you for sharing! I'm being less of a wall of text about nutrition science these days than I have been in the past, but it's always churning under the surface and it frequently pops out when I talk about cooking.

[chemicalscience-crimson]

The X-Ray Diffraction Pattern of the Ash Content on Ignition at 900 ˚C of a Copy Paper Sample and its Mechanical and Optical Properties_Crimson Publishers

Abstract

The ash on ignition at 900 ˚C of a A4 copy paper sample UPM New Future Multi was determined to be 15.4%w/w and its X-ray diffraction pattern showed the presence of only portlandite syn Ca(OH)2 peaks placed at 2θ values of 18o, 29o, 34o, 46o, 47o, 51o, 54o, 63o, 72o which corresponded to crystal planes of 111, 110, 112. The high tensile force value of 4.5KN/m of the dry A4 copy paper sample correlated well with its high pH value of 9.6 and high ash on ignition content of 15.4%w/w. Along with them the roughness Bendtsen of the paper was found in a scale which related well with its pick resistance measured to be 1.96m/s in the machine direction and 0.39m/s in the counter direction. The band gap energy Eg from the Diffuse Reflection Spectroscopy (DRS) study of the A4 copy paper sample was calculated to be 1.169715722005400000000000eV. The absorption coefficient α(ν) near the edges was calculated to be 4.27185997cm-1 and the band gap was obtained by intercepting the linear fitted line in the plot of (αhv)^2 versus hv. The X-Ray powder diffraction pattern of portlandite was indexed by trial and error, and some peaks were assigned their hkl values. Finally, the Miller indices of the reflections were determined as well as the separation of planes. The separation of the 111 plane in the rhombohedral lattice was calculated to be 0.2984038nm. The separation of the 110 plane in the rhombohedral lattice was calculated to be 0.423379nm and of the 112 plane was 0.2205806429nm.

Read more about this article: https://crimsonpublishers.com/acsr/fulltext/ACSR.000566.php

For more articles in our journal: https://crimsonpublishers.com/acsr/

[copperbadge]

Hi Sam, could you please recommend any resources/websites to learn about ADHD medication? Until reading your post about second-line meds I thought Adderal was the only one

I can definitely talk about it a little! Always bearing in mind that I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice, etc. etc.

So, I've had many friends with ADHD in my life before I got my diagnosis and I picked up some stuff from them even before getting diagnosed; I also spoke with my prescribing psychiatrist about options when we met. If you think your psychiatrist might be resistant to discussing options, or you don't have one, doing your own research is good, but it's not really a substitute for a specialist in medication management. So it's also important to know what your needs are -- ie, "I want help with my executive function but I need something that's nonaddictive" or "I want something nonsedative" or "I don't think the treatment I'm on is working, what is available outside of this kind of medication?"

The problems you run into with researching medication for ADHD are threefold:

Most well-informed sources aren't actually geared towards non-doctor adults who just want to know what their options are -- they're usually either doctors who don't know how to talk about medication to non-doctors, or doctors (and parents) talking to parents about pediatric options.

A huge number of sites when you google are either AI-generated, covert ads for stimulant addiction rehab, or both.

Reliable sites with easy-to-understand information are not updated super often.

So you just kind of have to be really alert and read the "page" itself for context clues -- is it a science journal, is it an organization that helps people with ADHD, is it a doctor, is it a rehab clinic, is it a drug advertiser, is it a random site with a weird URL that's probably AI generated, etc.

So for example, ADDitude Magazine, which is kind of the pre-eminent clearinghouse for non-scholarly information on ADHD, is a great place to start, but when the research is clearly outlined it sometimes isn't up-to-date, and when it's up-to-date it's often a little impenetrable. They have an extensive library of podcast/webinars, and I started this particular research with this one, but his slides aren't super well-organized, he flips back and forth between chemical and brand name, and he doesn't always designate which is which. However, he does have a couple of slides that list off a bunch of medications, so I just put those into a spreadsheet, gleaned what I could from him, and then searched each medication. I did find a pretty good chart at WebMD that at least gives you the types and brand names fairly visibly. (Fwiw with the webinar, I definitely spent more time skimming the transcript than listening to him, auto transcription isn't GOOD but it is helpful in speeding through stuff like that.)

I think, functionally, there are four types of meds for ADHD, and the more popular ones often have several variations. Sometimes this is just for dosage purposes -- like, if you have trouble swallowing pills there are some meds that come in liquids or patches, so it's useful to learn the chemical name rather than the brand name, because then you can identify several "brands" that all use the same chemical and start to differentiate between them.

Top of the list you have your methylphenidate and your amphetamine, those are the two types of stimulant medications; the most well known brand names for these are Ritalin (methylphenidate) and Adderall (amphetamine).

Then there's the nonstimulant medications, SNRIs (Strattera, for example) and Alpha-2 Agonists (guanfacine and clonidine, brand names Kapvay and Intuniv; I'm looking at these for a second-line medication). There's some crossover between these and the next category:

Antidepressants are sometimes helpful with ADHD symptoms as well as being helpful for depression; I haven't looked at these much because for me they feel like the nuclear option, but it's Dopamine reuptake inhibitors like Wellbutrin and tricyclics like Tofranil. If you're researching these you don't need to look at like, every antidepressant ever, just look for ones that are specifically mentioned in context with ADHD.

Lastly there are what I call the Offlabels -- medications that we understand to have an impact on ADHD for some people, but which aren't generally prescribed very often, and sometimes aren't approved for use. I don't know much about these, either, because they tend to be for complex cases that don't respond to the usual scrips and are particularly difficult to research. The one I have in my notes is memantine (brand name Namenda) which is primarily a dementia medication that has shown to be particularly helpful for social cognition in people with combined Autism/ADHD.

So yeah -- hopefully that's a start for you, but as with everything online, don't take my word for it -- I'm also a lay person and may get stuff wrong, so this is just what I've found and kept in my notes. Your best bet truly is to find a psychiatrist specializing in ADHD medication management and discuss your options with them. Good luck!

[20dollarlolita]

Quick tip to people with brightly colored hair:

You know how harsh shampoo, especially dandruff shampoo, will absolutely strip the color out of your hair? Well, it'll strip the dye transfer out of the collars on your nice blouses, too.

My laundry room sink has had a very hard life and I would appreciate it if you didn't judge it openly and to my face. It's about to get knocked down and replaced, so the stains are going to go away soon.

Anyway, left is before. This shirt has already been washed, and this is the color transfer that did not come out in the washing machine. Right, the bottom half of the collar has been scrubbed, but the top half has not. I put more work into scrubbing after these pictures, and got all the pink transfer off.

Why does this work? I have zero science but I do have two suspicions. First is the obvious, some shampoos will already strip unbonded dye molecules out of anything they can. However, synthrapol/professional textile detergent does the same, and I've never found it to be as effective.

The second thing is that there's a lot of staining that can't be chemically removed. It's got to be taken out with manual scrubbing. The fact that shampoo works up into a very thick lather makes it a lot easier to mechanically remove things, because it's just easier to manipulate the fabric.

Anyway, I know that shampooing garments to remove dye transfer is a strategy we've been using in EGL fashion for over a decade now, but there's a lot of people here who weren't in the EGL live journal scene of 2012, so if you ask me, it's time to bring the old resources back.

[netmassimo]

An article published in the journal "Meteoritics & Planetary Science" reports the results of the preliminary analysis of the samples of material from asteroid Bennu brought back to Earth by NASA's OSIRIS-REx space probe. A team of researchers conducted morphological and chemical analyzes of the samples, finding a lot of carbon and nitrogen together with organic compounds, all very important components for life forms of the Earth's type.

[incomingalbatross]

Dipper is a nerd but he's not a STEM nerd. He likes puzzles and codes and mysteries and cryptids and DD&MD and elaborate schemes - we don't see any particular interest in machines or computers or in chemical/biological/geological analysis of the various weirdnesses he uncovers. His Journal entries are super people-focused ("I raised the dead" is explicitly less important than "Stan knew all along!!" which. BUDDY). His life goal is, and I quote, to get into "a good technical college with a photography and media production minor to start my own ghost hunting show."

I love that Gravity Falls has a bunch of different flavors of nerds. Ford is "every science under the sun" and Mabel is "every artform" while Dipper and Stan and Soos are all harder to pin down. It's fun. We've got nerd diversity.