Beautiful Chemical Reactions

Eight types of beautiful chemical reactions are presented in this short video. For more information, please visit: BeautifulChemistry.net

Video & Editing
Yan Liang (L2Molecule.com)

Chemical Reaction Design
Xiangang Tao, Wei Huang, & Yan Liang
Chemical reactions were shot at the Chemistry Experiment Teaching Center of USTC

Music
Royalty-free audio clips from Maxon Cinema 4D Assets

© 2014 Institute of Advanced Technology, University of Science and Technology of China
© 2014 Tsinghua University Press

Humans Not Only Creatures That Think About Thinking

April Flowers reports:

Metacognition, or the ability to think about thinking, is not an ability solely limited to humans according to a new study. Scientists at Georgia State University and the University of Buffalo recently revealed that chimpanzees, humans’ closest relatives, also appear to have the ability.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, is the work of Michael J. Beran and Bonnie M. Perdue of the Georgia State Language Research Center (LRC), and J. David Smith of the University at Buffalo.

“The demonstration of metacognition in nonhuman primates has important implications regarding the emergence of self-reflective mind during humans’ cognitive evolution,” the research team noted.

The scientists at Georgia State’s LRC have trained chimpanzees to use a language-like system of symbols to name things. This gives researchers a novel way to investigate the animals’ states of knowing or not knowing.

For this study, the researchers tested the chimps on a task that required them to use their naming system to identify a food hidden in a location. If, for example, a banana was hidden, the chimpanzees would report that fact by touching the symbol for banana on their symbol keyboard. They would then get the food if they got it right.

The scientists then provided the chimpanzees with either complete or incomplete information about the identity of the food rewards.

Sometimes the animals had already seen the item available in the hidden location. They would immediately name the item by touching the correct symbol without going to look at the item in the hidden location to see what it was.

Other times, the chimps had no information about the hidden food item. This was because they had not seen any food yet on that trial or because even if they had seen a food item, it might not have been the one moved to the hidden location. In these cases, the chimps should have first gone to look in the hidden location before trying to name any food.

The end result was that the chimpanzees named items immediately and directly when they knew what was hidden. However, they sought out more information before naming when they did not already know.

“This pattern of behavior reflects a controlled information-seeking capacity that serves to support intelligent responding, and it strongly suggests that our closest living relative has metacognitive abilities closely related to those of humans,” the authors said.

Exhaled Breath Is Unique Fingerprint

Jason Palmer reports:

Compounds Present In Exhaled Breath Can Act As A "Fingerprint" For Individuals

These "metabolites" represent the waste products of the body's chemistry - but their uniqueness had never been shown.

A study in PLOS ONE suggests they could be as useful to medical diagnosis as those found in urine or blood.

Because a breath test is non-invasive and the results are instantaneous, it could prove even more convenient for example in anaesthesia or doping tests.

"I don't understand why breath hasn't been a widely used [means of] medical science diagnosis," said the study's lead author Renato Zenobi of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.

"In traditional Chinese medicine, they feel your pulse, look at your tongue and smell your breath," he told BBC News. "There are trained dogs whocan sniff cancer with a fairly good hit-rate - but the dog doesn't tell you what the compounds are."

Prior work has shown that the precise type of bacteria responsible for lung infections or even the presence of stomach cancer could be discerned in the breath.

What remained to be seen was whether the breath's metabolic contents varied enough between people - and varied little enough within an individual - to be diagnostic - to act as a real and repeatable "breathprint".

"You need to show there is a core individual signal that is stable over time," Prof Zenobi said. "If it changes a lot during the course of the day or after you've had a coffee or smoked a cigarette, you can just forget about it."

It is the non-invasive and immediate nature of the test that makes it most promising.

It could for example help determine an appropriate dosage in anaesthesia, where an effective but safe dose is dependent on a patient's tolerance and metabolic rate - a small dose could be given to test how it is metabolised. A quick, at-the-starting-line test could be administered to check for doping in sport.

As the tests continue and the stability and uniqueness of each individual's breathprint is further verified, it could become a staple of the long-predicted "personalised medicine", tailored to each person's chemistry.

Lover's Hearts Beat At The Same Rate Everyday

This graph shows something quite wonderful. It shows that in a couple, the heart rates of a man and woman are in sync. Yes, when you're involved in a romantic relationship, your heart beats as fast as your partner's.

This couple was one of the 32 heterosexual couples in a study conducted by physiologies at UC Davis in the US that aimed to see if people in romantic relationships co-regulated their physiologies with their partners. By co-regulated, read change; by physiologies, read heart rates.

In one of the experiments, the couples sat facing each other but just far enough that they would not be able to touch. The researchers asked them to simply stare at one another for three minutes straight in as calm a manner as possible (ahem) while they monitored the couple's heart rates.

The graph above does not actually show the heart rates of the man and woman changing with time. Instead it shows a complex measure of heart rate which takes into consideration the observed changes in heart rate due to the individual self-regulating, that is trying to control himself or herself by keeping calm for instance, as well as the changes associated with the individual as he or she unconsciously mimics the partner, known as co-regulation. Since the extent of both self-regulation and co-regulation is different in man and woman, this measure allows for comparison between the two. In the above graph, the measure is actually shown by a blue line.

But the blue line is so closely matched by a red line that you barely see it. What does the red line indicate? It indicates the changes one would expect to see if the couple's heart rates are the same. Therefore the more closely the blue and red lines match, the closer an individual's heart rate is to the partner's. It is no surprise then that when the researchers compared the measure of heart rates between people not involved in a romantic relationship, the blue and red lines did not match.

The researchers also found that it was the women who tended to adjust their heart rates to their partners. Why this actually happens on a psychological level however is still a mystery. The researchers speculate that women have a strong link to their partners may have something to do with them having more empathy.
And inspired from this study, here's a great line: "I love you so much that my heart beats as fast as yours whenever I see you." 

Via: "Nature"

Ingredients Of Life

Posted by "CavalierZee"


By "Avkari Alon"


Illustrations Of Chemical Compounds