topics of scientific interest

Now we call that which is in itself worthy of pursuit more complete than that which is worthy of pursuit for the sake of something else, and that which is never desirable for the sake of something else more complete than the things that are desirable both in themselves and for the sake of that other thing, and therefore we call complete without qualification [haplôs teleion] that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else (369-70; 1097a30-1097b).ARISTOTLE

periodic table of the elements


Encarta Concise Edition
Thermodynamics

Sirach 6:18 
   
   My son, gather instruction from thy youth up: so
              shalt thou find wisdom till thine old age. 



The Millenium is just around the corner

THE CORAL REEFS


Tuberculosis mycobacteria=slow growing aerobic rods multilayered cell wall contains lipids which are acid-fast impact craters for just as the identity is an impact crater
Saturn has one interesting point, it is the only planet in the solar system whose specific gravity is less than water. This means that if you placed any of the other planets in a huge tub of water, they would sink. If you placed Saturn in this tub, it would FLOAT! Only problem is that when you take it out, it leaves a ring...(sorry) Saturn has at least 18 satellites and 12 of those are over 100 km (62 miles) across.

I in defining myself seek to understand them.

Selye, Hans,

in full HANS HUGO BRUNO SELYE (b. Jan. 26, 1907, Vienna, Austria-Hungary--d. Oct. 16, 1982, Montreal, Que., Can.), endocrinologist known for his studies of the effects of stress on the human body. Selye was educated at the German University of Prague (M.D., 1929; Ph.D., 1931) and at the universities of Paris and Rome. In 1931 he came to the United States to work as a research fellow at Johns Hopkins University. In 1932 he continued his fellowship at McGill University in Montreal, where he conducted his pioneering studies. He was later president of the International Institute of Stress at the University of Montreal. Selye first detected the effects of stress in 1936 when he injected ovarian hormones into the glandular system of laboratory rats. He found that the hormone stimulated the outer tissue of the adrenal glands of the rats, caused deterioration of the thymus gland, and produced ulcers and finally death. He eventually determined that these effects could be produced by administering virtually any toxic substance, by physical injury, or by environmental stress. Selye was able to extend his theory to humans, demonstrating that a stress-induced breakdown of the hormonal system could lead to conditions, such as heart disease and high blood pressure, that he called "diseases of adaptation." Selye was the author of 33 books, including Stress Without Distress (1974), which was translated into several languages. Related Spectrum Categories Strains and challenges put on adequate personality functioning: physical, psychological, and social stresses; e.g., frustration, conflict, personal inadequacy, deprivation of accustomed gratification Bodily mechanisms for the maintenance of human health during stress Developments in endocrinology: the discovery of insulin and the control of diabetes, the use of cortisone as an anti-inflammatory agent, the study and use of sex hormones To cite this page: "Selye, Hans" Britannica Online. [Accessed 02 April 1998].


Fullerenes are formed when vaporised carbon condenses in an 
atmosphere of inert gas. The gaseous carbon
  is obtained e.g. by directing an intense pulse of laser 
light at a carbon surface. The released carbon atoms are
  mixed with a stream of helium gas and combine to form 
clusters of some few up to hundreds of atoms. The
  gas is then led into a vacuum chamber where it
 expands and is cooled to some degrees above
 absolute zero.
  The carbon clusters can then be analysed 
with mass spectrometry. 

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resuscitation

acls protocols

 causes of asystole include
  hypoxia
  hypothermia
  hyperkalemia
  hypokalemia
  preexisting acidosis
  drug overdose
Basic Research, the Lifeline of Medicine by Arthur Kornberg, Stanford University, Stanford, CA The pursuit of curiosity about the basic facts of nature has proven, with few exceptions throughout the history of medical science, to be the route by which the successful drugs and devices of modern medicine were discovered. Though it seemed unreasonable and impractical, counterintuitive even to scientists, to solve an urgent problem of disease by exploring apparently unrelated questions in biology, chemistry and physics, these basic studies proved time and again to be utterly practical and cost-effective. Among the many investigations that seemed totally irrelevant to a practical objective and yet the source of celebrated advances in medical practice just four will be cited: x-rays, penicillin, polio vaccine and genetic engineering. X-rays The first Nobel Laureate in physics was Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, awarded the prize 1901 "in recognition of the extraordinary service he has rendered by the discovery of the remarkable rays subsequently named after him." A professor of physics in Wurzburg (Germany), he was curious about the passage of electricity in gases. In an experiment in 1895, he noticed that electric discharges in an evacuated tube generated rays that passed through a black cardboard box and made a nearby chemical luminous and fogged a photographic film. These truly remarkable rays penetrated flesh but not bone. The prompt applications to medical and surgical practice, and subsequent years to basic studies in physics, chemistry and biology have had the profoundest influence in science and in our daily lives. Penicillin The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1945 was awarded jointly to Alexander Fleming, Ernst Boris Chain and Howard Walter Florey "for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases." To Fleming is owed the discovery of penicillin and to Chain and Florey, the recognition of its therapeutic powers. By the strangest of chances Fleming found that a mold, contaminating a petri dish on which staphylococci were growing, had dissolved or lysed the bacteria. A liquid culture of this common Penicillium mold exuded a substance he called penicillin, responsible for this lysis. Even though the crude penicillin was nontoxic when Fleming injected it into mice, he never tried to see whether the substance would cure mice infected with a virulent bacterium, such as streptococci. The reason Fleming did not even try to do this simple experiment was that the prevailing dogma at that time was that immunotherapy rather than chemotherapy was the way to treat infectious diseases. The discovery of the therapeutic properties of penicillin by Chain and Fleming in 1940, after a lapse of fifteen years, came about from their curiosity about enzymes which lyse bacterial walls, believing penicillin to be such an enzyme much like a lytic enzyme, called lysozyme, which Fleming had discovered before penicillin. "The possibility that penicillin could have practical use in clinical medicine did not enter our minds when we started our work on penicillin", said Chain. "I started to work on penicillin in 1938, long before the outbreak of the war. The frequently repeated statement that the work was started as a contribution to the war effort, to find a chemotherapeutic agent suitable for the treatment of infected war wounds, has no basis. The only reason which motivated me to start the work on penicillin was scientific interest." Polio Vaccine The 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to John Franklin Enders and his junior associates Thomas Huckle Weller and Frederick Chapman Robbins "for their discovery of the ability of poliomyelitis viruses to grow in cultures of various types of tissue." For forty years, dependence on a monkey host for propagation of the polio virus limited progress in basic studies until 1949 when Enders, Weller and Robbins showed how cultures of kidney and other human and monkey cells could produce large quantities of the virus. This breakthrough opened the way to studies that set standards for precision in investigations of other viruses and led directly to the engineering of the Salk and Sabin vaccines that eliminated the dreaded specter of a disabling and often lethal disease. Genetic Engineering Severo Ochoa and Arthur Kornberg shared the Physiology or Medicine Nobel Prize for 1959 "for their discovery of the mechanisms in the biologic synthesis of ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid." In their devotion to enzymology as a route to the solution of biologic questions, Ochoa and Kornberg discovered novel enzymes which keyed the elucidation of the genetic code and provided the reagents for the creation of recombinant DNA and genetic engineering. Curiosity about the steps in the biosynthesis of nucleotides, the building blocks of the nucleic acids, and their assembly into these informational macromolecules have been the basis for the design of most chemotherapeutic agents currently used in the treatment of cancers, viral infections (e.g. AIDS and Herpes), and autoimmune diseases. At no time in these basic biochemical studies had there been any clues of their potential in the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease and the essential role they would play in genetic chemistry and related biotechnologies, the most revolutionary advance in the history of biomedical science. The lessons to be learned from these four histories and so many others should be crystal clear. No matter how counter-intuitive it may seem, basic research has proven over and over to be the lifeline of practical advances in medicine. Without advances, medicine regresses and reverts to witchcraft. As in biomedical science, pioneering industrial inventions have not been mothered by necessity. Rather, inventions for which there was no commercial use, only later became the commercial airplanes, xerography and lasers on which modern society depends. Curiosity led to the inventions that became the source of industrial strength. It is imperative for a nation, a culture, a university and a company to understand the nature of the creative process and to encourage its support.


scientific facts of note

1. the sun is about a million miles across. 2 in the room molecules are flying at an average velocity of 500 yards a second 3 in the interior of the sun at 40000000 degress they fly at 100 miles a second. 4.the earth travels around the sun at twenty miles a second.

5. 12 grams of carbon -12 is a mole and contains 6 point oh 2 3 times 10 to the 23rd power number of atoms which is avogadro's number.

6. Rhodium which is a metal is found in ores of platinum and is also found in copper areas. It is of interest that rhodium is used in alloys with those same metals to produce hard technologically useful tools. In other words the source of rhodium predicts its usefulness.

7.telomerase

(= telomere terminal transferase)

A DNA polymerase with rather unusual properties that will only elongate oligonucleotides from the telomere and not other sequences. The enzyme contains an essential 159 residue RNA sequence that provides a template for the replication of the G-rich telomere sequences (so that the enzyme could in fact be considered a reverse transcriptase).


Cuff Links

my home: hi how are ya
The singer lock: a new understanding of the weather
Horus: history of science
think quest: lots of scientific info
biology textbook for bio majors: Michael Farabee, instructor
lycos: a search engine
Cells Alive: graphics of cells and crystals
pedros list of research tools: many scientific journals and links
WASSER: notes on water and software?
University of Chicago Chemistry Web site: material on chemistry inorganic and organic
UIC Organic Chemistry home page: gateway to material on organic chemistry
UIC organic chemistry: table of contents
university of pennsylvania site: apoptosis and links
Discovery of Fullerenes rewarded: to nobel prize homepage
Fullerenes: Bristol UK
molecule of the month from Bristol: WATER and biochem-complex
The Moon: Geophysical Site-Apollo
cancer gene data base: contains newly discovered oncogenes
web cell tutorial: Cray
the dictionary of cell biology: Academic Press Ltd
science reference shelf: goes to source material on various matters
mit archive site: who knows what?
Brian Lamp's home page at USD: chemistry notes and access to other sources and search enginesg
lecture help: csudh dpt of chemistry
Archaeology on line: A chapter by chapter list of links
exPASsy: biochemical pathways
museum of paleontoogy: links to the pleistocene
math pages : contains nice midis
Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo: This site is a good zoological link
Euclid's elements: Clark edu.
Orbital Pinball: A geometry toy and other toys
Hydroponics 101: Hydroponics website
The New Scientist: Pretty Good reading
Air Photos: of Illinois countryside