Umwelt

Back in 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an article titled “What is it like to be a bat?”. Back then, he was probing the question of consciousness.

 

The answer fifty years later is that we still don’t know. We’ve learned a lot about bats since then. We’ve also learned a lot about various creatures large and small, and scientists now realize we don’t know what it’s like to be a bat or a cat, an owl or a fowl, because we humans rely mostly on one of our five senses: vision. Our vision is acute and we’re good at distinguishing colors. Some birds have better vision than us, but most creatures of the animal kingdom do not. This is the subject of Ed Yong’s marvelous new book, An Immense World, subtitled “How animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us”.

 

While vision is the primary sense utilized by humans as we go through our motions in everyday life, we also smell, taste, hear, and touch. But for a mole in a hole, vision isn’t important at all. Some moles are blind, and those that are not have poor vision. But moles have other senses enhanced. The star-nosed mole, a remarkably strange creature, has a snout covered with sensitive mechanoreceptors that relays detailed information to its brain of what it encounters. How the mole decides what is food and what is not, just from the sensation of touch, is so quick that it can only be captured with high-speed cameras.

 

We have an anthropocentric view of our five senses. Thus, we think that other creatures use their senses the way we do and pay attention to the same things that catch our attention. This is almost never the case! I had long thought (because I read it somewhere) that the zebra has stripes so it can camouflage itself in the savanna, especially in a group setting, and thus confuse lions. Turns out lions have rather poor vision and do not notice the stripes that we think are significant. The zebra might look just like a horse or a donkey to a lion. Why the stripes? Turns out that the stripes are to ward off bloodsucking insects that carry disease like the tsetse fly.

 

We also artificially classify the senses based on where our organs of perception are located. The eye sees. The nose smells. The tongue tastes. The ear hears. The skin touches. Depending on the stimulus, one or more of our senses may pick it up. We’re familiar with the close relationship between smell and taste. When you have a bad cold and can’t smell much, food tastes much blander. Or you pick up something from one sense and shift to another. You hear a noise, and you turn your head so you can see where it comes from. How we perceive the world as humans is based on the particular sensory organs we have and use. Ed Yong calls this the Umwelt – a word first used by a zoologist Jakob von Uexkull. Here’s how he describes the feeling of it.

 

Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble [the Umwelt], perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world… Uexkull didn’t use [Umwelt] simply to refer to an animal’s surroundings. Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience – its perceptual world... Creatures could be standing in the same physical space and have completely different Umwelten.

 

Yong’s book is a marvelous exploration into the Umwelten of different creatures. All I can say after reading his many examples is that evolution has tuned the remarkable sense-abilities of different creatures based on their surrounding environment and ecology. Yong is also one of the most engaging science writers I’ve had the privilege of reading. His book is a page-turner and you’ll want to read every footnote. Nature is strange and fascinating. I’m sure I would have become a biologist had I read An Immense World at an early age or seen the Planet Earth series. Living creatures are amazing! I’m making up for it as a chemist by studying the origin of life.

 

Chapter 1 of Yong’s book is titled “Leaking Sacks of Chemicals”. By grouping smell and taste together, he emphasizes the uniqueness of these two senses – they sense chemical substances at the individual molecule level. Yong writes: “Many living things can sense light. Some can respond to sound. A select few can detect electric and magnetic fields. But every thing, perhaps without exception, can detect chemicals. Even a bacterium, which consists of just one cell, can find food and avoid danger by picking up on molecular clues from the outside world. Bacteria can also release their own chemical signals to communicate with each other…” I’d call this the First Sense! How appropriate that it is chemical in nature!

 

I learned about the exquisite nature of the dog’s nose. It’s a marvel! (You’ll have to read Yong’s book to find out more.) And it turns out the human nose is also quite impressive and can be trained. Those books that say our sense of smell is poor in the animal kingdom are very wrong, says Yong. And he provides examples to back up his claim. It’s tough to study taste and smell. Yong writes: “Scientists who work on vision and hearing have it comparatively easy. Light and sound waves can be defined by clear and measurable properties like brightness and wavelength, or loudness and frequency… Such predictability simply doesn’t exist in the realm of smells. To classify them, scientists use subjective concepts like intensity and pleasantness, which can only be measured by asking people. Even worse, there are no good ways of predicting what a molecule smells like – or even if it smells at all – from its chemical structure.” Sounds like a challenge for chemists!

 

I learned about moths. I learned about ants. I learned about elephants. I learned about birds – vultures, migrating seabirds, homing pigeons. I learned about snake tongues. Then I learned that bees and flies and wasps have their taste sensors on their feet and legs. Who would have thought? I learned that the catfish probably has the best sense of taste in the animal kingdom: “They have taste buds spread all over their scale-free bodies, from the tips of their whisker-like barbels to their tails. There’s hardly a place you can touch a catfish without brushing thousands of taste buds. If you lick one of them, you’ll both simultaneously taste each other!”

 

And that was just the first chapter. I could probably write a blog post on each chapter. I might at some point when I go back and re-read the book. There are so many nuggets I’d love to explore further, and Yong provides an extensive bibliography to do so. I’ve already started on one of the books he cites, and have several others on my to-read list. I borrowed An Immense World from the library. But I know I’ll be reading it again so I’ll be purchasing my own copy. It’s that good!

 

P.S. Here’s my blog post on Yong’s previous book.

Absorption Log

Light meets biology in The Optics of Life by Sönke Johnsen. It’s a useful primer for anyone who wants to learn more about photons and the cells that detect them. Biology, chemistry, and physics are rolled into one served alongside just a few mathematical equations, and a sprinkling of wry humor. Yes, the book is science-nerdy. Yes, the second chapter is all about the importance of units and how not paying attention to wavelength versus frequency can really screw you up. But there are so many great nuggets, be they factoids or quotable jokes, that I’m quite willing to plow through the denser sections. Most important to me, reading it makes me think about all manner of interdisciplinary things!

 

I’ve just finished the fourth chapter, titled Absorption. Here’s the opening paragraph for a taste: “Absoprtion has been called the ‘death of photons’ (Bohren and Clothiaux, 2006). While the energy of a photon is never truly lost (reincarnation is a fact in physcis), most people find the conversion of photons into heat and chemical reactions less appealing than their original emission. I admit that I enjoy watching bioluminescent plankton more than contemplating the blackness of my T-shirt. Without absorption though, the earth would be a far less colorful place, with no paintings, flowers, leopard spots, or stained-glass windows.”

 

Johnsen will go on to cover paints, windows, the coloration in all manner of species. But first one has to learn about resonance, antennae, and how electromagnetic “signals” are propagated. Eventually he gets to the difference between absorptivity and absorbance. Our G-Chem students are introduced to this in their first semester of lab where they do some experiments to determine the concentration of an unknown dye with the help of a spectrometer. Absorbance is a funny thing, though. It is defined as the negative (natural) logarithm of the fraction of light that is transmitted. In equation form, this is A = –ln(f_T).

 

Natural logarithms show up in a variety of situations. Whenever you have a large enough sample of particles that can randomly do something or not do something, you observe macroscopic behavior that corresponds to an exponential decay curve. In the case of absorbance, this has to do with whether a photon hits a molecule and gets absorbed. In radioactive decay, it’s related to when an atomic nucleus might transform into another by emitting radiation. In chemical kinetics, a first-order reaction has a rate that is proportional to its concentration. We’re not used to thinking about exponential decays. We think linearly. It takes a bit to get my G-Chem 2 students to see that if rate is linearly proportional to concentration, then the concentration changes exponentially with time.

 

Johnsen explains why absorption and absorbance are often confused, pointing out that it’s partly because when the fraction of light absorbed is small, then absorbance takes approximately the same value. An equation that helps you see this: ln(1 + x) is approximately equal to x when x is small. Johnsen then explains what the absorption coefficient is and why it’s useful especially if you were a biologist trying to determine what the photoreceptors of marine creatures are detecting. Colors and light in the sea are an interesting business to the denizens of the deep especially since longer wavelength (redder) light is more easily absorbed by water, i.e., the bluer light has more penetrating power. All manner of adaptations arise, and Johnsen deftly explains the preponderance of different kinds of reds in many marine invertebrates.

 

I found the discussion on paints enlightening. Apparently “many oil paints look nearly black when they come out of the tube. It’s not until they are mixed with white paint that they look like the color on the label. White paint (and white in general) is more special than it looks. Rather than simply being paint without pigment, it is actually a mixture of a transparent latex or oil base and powdered titanium dioxide.” The key here is that TiO₂ has “a high refractive index in the visible range (~2.5), about the same as diamond… and scatters a lot light.” Artists have to know how much white to mix into their oils to get what they need. This same interplay of absorption and scattering is also true for colors of organisms. Johnsen goes through a series of examples and adaptations in cephalopods, birds, and more.

 

This is followed by another interesting discussion of Easter egg dyes, and he smoothly pivots into the odd case of green. Green dyes transmit in the green range, or more pertinently, they have pigments that strongly absorb the red and the blue. But yellow, orange or red dyes essentially just have a step function with low transmittance at short wavelength and high transmittance at longer wavelength. (For blue dyes, the step function is in the opposite direction.) We also observe these features in the molecules of color that living organisms use – the carotenoids. I find this odd and intriguing. Surely there are molecules that can provide the color peaks exactly where needed in the spectrum, but maybe there’s a limit to what can be biosynthesized that lead to the asymmetry. There’s something strange about all of this. It’s certainly opened my eyes to how much I don’t know about vision, color, and light, as it pertains to biology (and not just its simple physics). I’m tempted to pitch teaching a class about the “Chemistry of Living Color”, and add it to the list of courses I might want to do one day that will give me an excuse to delve deeper!

Conceptual and Procedural Knowledge

“Just plugging and chugging numbers into a formula while solving a problem is NOT learning.” This is a common refrain you might hear from a teacher in a class that requires some quantitative work. Closely related to this is the oft-quoted dictum that “knowledge does not equal understanding”. We’ve been hearing this more and more in the age of the internet where knowledge seems “easy” to acquire, while understanding remains elusive. This leads to setting up a distinction between conceptual knowledge and procedural knowledge; the former being the holy grail of learning, and the latter being its mindless robotic plug-and-chug counterpart.

 

As an instructor of chemistry, I don’t think the two can be easily separated, if one desires to learn the material (at least in General Chemistry and Physical Chemistry, the two classes I teach most often). Sometimes my P-Chem students will say “I get the concept, but I get lost in the math.” I beg to differ, especially when it comes to quantum chemistry – if you don’t comprehend the math, you likely don’t have a firm grasp on the concepts. I teach the students conceptual material alongside problem-solving, weaving back-and-forth between two sides of the same coin.

 

Furthermore, a good way to check if you really understand the material is to work on a variety of problems, i.e., to make your knowledge more flexible! Conceptual material is always fuzzy when first encountered, and to sharpen both the heart of the matter and its boundaries, one needs to try and answer questions that probe the understanding in a variety of ways. Sometimes this requires a calculation. Sometimes it requires drawing a structure. Sometimes it requires comparing two calculations or two structures. Sometimes it requires making arguments and constructing explanations. I think conceptual material in chemistry isn’t intuitive, and that’s why it’s a challenging subject to learn. But it can be illuminated by practicing problem-solving.

 

There’s an interesting review article by Rittle-Johnson and colleagues titled “Not a One-Way Street: Bidirectional Relations Between Procedural and Conceptual Knowledge of Mathematics” (Educ. Psychol. Rev. 2016, 27, 587-597). The title pretty much tells you what the story will be. There has been a trend in mathematics education in the U.S. to focus on conceptual material first before getting to the procedural parts. The article investigates whether there is evidence that the conceptual-to-procedural approach leads to superior learning outcomes. Broadly speaking, the answer is no. But that’s because setting up experiments that can compare conceptual-to-procedural versus procedural-to-conceptual are not so easy to set up without other confounding factors intruding on the experimental design.

 

The article also discusses the evidence in favor of the two-way mutual support between conceptual and procedural knowledge acquisition. It points out some problematic prevalent beliefs: (1) that “conceptual knowledge has sometimes been used to refer to knowledge that is richly connected while procedural knowledge [was] sparsely connected”, (2) that “procedural fluency seems to refer only to an end state of well-developed knowledge, while conceptual knowledge can refer to a variable amount of knowledge”, and (3) that culturally in the U.S. “practice is not believed to aid the development of understanding” while in many other countries, “practice is viewed as a route towards understanding”. In Asia for example, mathematics education often involves learning procedural knowledge first (being able to plug-and-chug efficiently) before addressing some of the trickier conceptual bits.

 

In G-Chem, there has been a shift in which topics we cover first, and we can see this by comparing textbooks from the last decade or two with earlier ones. Stoichiometry (lots of plug-and-chug) has been moved to later in the first semester. Gases (often also requiring calculations) are typically encountered at the tail end of G-Chem 1, sometimes getting short shrift. On the other hand, electronic structure of atoms and chemical bonding have been moved earlier. I don’t think that’s a necessarily bad choice overall (but do we really need orbitals at the G-Chem level?) and I’m comfortable with this move. That being said, I also do some calculational work (moles/masses, some energy calculations) earlier in the semester.

 

One potential drawback of the current sequence is that G-Chem 2 becomes much more math-heavy (thermodynamics, kinetics, equilibria). Students who are struggling with procedural fluency in doing calculations get mired down in those details and aren’t getting the conceptual material because they’re floundering in the procedural parts. I don’t think loading more conceptual knowledge upfront helps them because the conceptual material (in thermodynamics which is all about keeping quantitative track of energy) is dependent on being able to work the relevant calculations. My experience (in office hours) is that students who can work the calculations also grok the conceptual parts. Those that struggle with the calculations have little grasp of the conceptual material. Even though I always lead with some (although not a lot) of conceptual material for each subtopic in G-Chem 2.

 

Finally, a word about assessment. Rittle-Johnson’s article has a section titled “Evaluation Criteria”. Measuring conceptual knowledge is challenging. Measuring procedural knowledge is easier because you can check this by posing calculational problems. If the procedural task involves “near transfer”, this can actually be a good measure (albeit oblique) of conceptual knowledge. I’m not surprised by this, which is why I think exams are a good assessment tool in G-Chem and P-Chem, despite naysayers (who almost always do not teach chemistry). To some extent, the conceptual pieces of chemistry are acquired gestalt-like, and are not amenable to reductionist breaking-into-pieces. The procedural parts, on the other hand, can be atomized into pieces – and once the student gains fluency (thus moving their acquired procedural knowledge into long-term memory), they now have the bandwidth to synthesize their conceptual knowledge. But we can’t expect them to do so automatically on their own. Hence the need to teach both procedural and conceptual knowledge and keep going back-and-forth between the two. That is the road to understanding (chemistry).

Mutiverse: A Fringe Idea

The multiverse is all the rage. In the last several months I watched three blockbuster movies (thanks, local library for providing DVDs) featuring the multiverse: Spider-Man No Way Home; Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness; and Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. (The last of those three, helmed by Michelle Yeoh, was the best in my opinion.) But the multiverse is not a new idea. It was called the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics when first put forward by the physicist Hugh Everett. And although there was a lag before it gained mainstream popularity, it’s now ubiquitous in sci-fi and fantasy.

 

I just started watching the TV series Fringe. It’s old by today’s standards, having debuted in 2008, almost fifteen years ago. I started watching because I’d heard that one of the protagonists, Walter Bishop, was supposedly a biochemist or at least held an endowed chair in biochemistry at Harvard. But at the beginning of the series he’s locked up in a mental institution, and he fits the caricature of a mad scientist in many ways. There’s physics, chemistry, biology, but fitting the theme of fringe science, all sorts of weird unexplained phenomena permeate the series. Chemistry-wise, Walter has a basement lab at Harvard, and once released and working for the FBI, one often sees scenes of glassware, colored solutions, and the occasional Bunsen burner.

 

Turns out I’m not much like Walter Bishop. I don’t have the absent-minded mad professor vibe, I’m not as familiar with the range of weird physics and biology, I don’t dose myself with hallucinogens, and I don’t keep a cow in the lab. Nor do I experiment on humans or animals. (On the other hand, I do share some similarities to Walter White, protagonist of Breaking Bad.) The idea of the multiverse and being able to travel between universes doesn’t faze Walter Bishop. Season One hinted at the multiverse, but I’ve just started Season Two, the multiverse theme has become dominant. There’s a clever explanation for the feeling of déjà vu – you’ve just accessed an alternate universe for a moment – although I think the explanation provided in The Matrix movie is cleverer.

 

I just finished the fourth episode where one of the characters explains the danger of multiverses becoming accessible to each other. She takes two glass globes and smashes them together while talking about the Pauli Exclusion Principle. I’d interpret it in the following way atomistically. Imagine a probability distribution cloud of an electron (an “orbital”) with an up-spin electron. If it comes close to another orbital with a down-spin electron, they can occupy the same space. Their probability waves can have constructive interference (based on superposition of in-phase waves). There’s no problem and they can inhabit the same “space” so to speak. But if the two electrons have the same spin, the Pauli Exclusion Principle kicks in and forces the approaching waves to be out-of-phase and they must destructively interfere, i.e., they will destroy each other. Now that’s a clever fringe idea for the multiverse!

 

The multiverse is no longer considered a fringe idea, despite its prominence in Fringe. Mass media has made it mainstream. But is it true? Is it reality? The many-worlds hypothesis is challenging to test scientifically. It might be impossible to ever know if there are parallel universes adjoining our own, or whether every decision generates newborn ones. Sure, one can dream up fantastical scenarios where alternate-you shows up and tells you the “truth” of the matter. For now, I entertain the idea of a multiverse as entertainment.

ABC in XYZ

I’ve been thinking about the design of a one-semester integrated introductory chemistry and biology course that isn’t a double course. In a double course, you could get away with less integration and not have to make so many hard choices of what content to keep and what to jettison. As a chemist (who finds biology interested), I can only claim expertise in teaching introductory chemistry so I won’t address the biology portion in this post.

 

What “traditional” topics can I cut from first-semester General Chemistry? The underlying tension is that I’d want to discard topics that don’t integrate so well with the topics in introductory biology, but I wouldn’t want to leave them out if they are a crucial building block for subsequent courses. After all General Chemistry is a pre-requisite for many other courses in the sciences, for good reason in my biased opinion.

 

I’ve previously considered leaving out orbitals. But let’s push this idea further. I could leave out the photoelectric effect, wave-particle duality, quantum numbers (and their rules), orbital shapes and sizes, orbital energies (and photoelectron spectroscopy), electron configurations, hybridization, molecular orbital theory, among other things. That’s a significant chunk: I’d say that’s about 20% of our G-Chem 1 syllabus. If I leave out metallic bonding, structures of solids, and a bunch of “tricky” Lewis structures (molecules that won’t be encountered in biochemistry), most of the gases chapter, parts of stoichiometry, nuclear chemistry, that’s knocking off another 20%. I can likely “flip” another 10% of the material so that I don’t need to use class time, and that gets me to the 50% goal.

 

Things I can’t leave out: some basics of atomic structure (enough so students have some understanding of the periodic table, basics of chemical bonding, and drawing some Lewis structures), some stoichiometry (balancing chemical equations, doing some calculations, acid-base and redox reactions), a molecular view of phases of matter including aqueous solutions, and certainly intermolecular forces and their applications. I could see these topics gelling well with a number of topics in introductory biology. Also, what I’ve left in will not prevent the student from being sufficiently prepared for a standard G-Chem 2 course (thermodynamics, kinetics, equilibria, electrochemistry).

 

But having chopped a number of topics that are important for a student who wants to continue in chemistry, where would these go? I propose a follow-up course cheekily abbreviated “ABC in XYZ” or “Atoms, Bonds, Chemistry in 3-D”! It would cover many of those topics, but in more detail, i.e., I would move some material from a traditional inorganic chemistry course (symmetry, group theory, metals) to be part of ABC in XYZ. Topics such as (advanced) electron configuration and valence bond theory, metallic bonding, molecular orbital theory, solid structures, the acid-base-redox nexus, can get the treatment they deserve. And we’d be able to sink our teeth into the unity and diversity of the periodic table both as an organizing principle but also with its nitty-gritty idiosyncracies. This would set up a student very well for a quantum chemistry course in a Chem major (assuming they have the pre-requisite math) or a more advanced inorganic chemistry course that could be much more interesting than the traditional one.

 

Now I just need to go write up a syllabus. Too lazy to do so on a Friday afternoon…

Two Heads

Two Heads is a delightful “exploration of how our brains work with other brains” composed in a beautifully illustrated format. The main protagonists are cognitive science emeritus professors Uta and Chris Frith, who are also married to each other. Their son, Alex, is an established non-fiction author of books aimed at children. Not to worry if you don’t know anything about brains or neuroscience. They teach you as you read along. And each chapter is masterfully connected to the next so you just want to keep going!

 

While I was familiar with a number of the classic experiments they describe, there were more than enough new things for me to mull over. One that really caught my attention was over-imitation. Many animals learn through imitation, as do humans. Children are imitating what they see and hear all the time! Both children and adults also learn through being taught something explicitly – the basis for setting up an education system! But the interesting part is that when we first learn something, we do it through over-imitation. Instead of just copying, we try to copy exactly. I see this all the time when teaching chemistry, especially because the subject matter is often counter-intuitive.

 

Why do humans over-imitate? (Apes don’t, apparently.) The Friths argue that it’s for social reasons: “We do it because this is the way our group does things, and we want to fit in with out group.” And sometimes we do the opposite: “Deliberately not over-imitating can be a way to mark ourselves part of one group rather than another.”( Interestingly, some autistic kids tend not to over-imitate.) But there’s more. We don’t often notice that we have a tendency to imitate someone who seem more like us (the in-group) rather than someone who seems more different (the out-group). I wonder how that impacts the teaching-learning nexus. As someone who grew up in a different country but who now teaches (mostly) Americans between the ages of 18-22, and who has a noticeable accent when speaking English, I wonder if and how that affects the subconscious parts of student learning in the classroom.

 

There’s an interesting chapter about how the brain recognizes self from other. Apparently, you can tickle yourself if you use a double-robot arm contraption where the second robot arm has a time delay response. Weird. And sometimes the feedback self-recognition loop can break down, and we see this manifested in certain types of delusions, hearing voices, and schizophrenia. Apparently, schizophrenics can often tickle themselves. This discussion leads to the famous experiments by Benjamin Libet – before taking an action, the brain activity can be observed before one consciously recognizes the decision to take the action –  which brings up questions of free-will. The Friths think that interpreting “that your body moves, then your brain retroactively decides that the movement was deliberate” is incorrect. Instead, “your brain predicts it is going to move, then compares the final movement with the prediction. Only after the prediction has been tested does the movement get logged by your brain as a deliberate movement. It’s a quirk of biophysics that this operation takes an amount of time that can be observed and measured.”

 

I’d been thinking along those lines after reading Robert Rosen’s Anticipatory Systems. I think an interesting way to characterize life is that it’s an anticipatory system whose function cannot be cleanly separated from its genesis. Evolution of the brain is to improve anticipatory ability, particularly when it comes to social interactions – at least that’s what I gather from reading Terrence Deacon. This fits well with the overall discussion in Two Heads, and much of the book focuses on the social aspects of cognition of neuroscience. Early in the first chapter, they explicitly say that “your brain is a Bayesian prediction engine”.

 

Halfway through the book there is an interlude chapter discussing how challenging some of these psychology experiments can be with their many limitations and pitfalls. It can be so tempting to over-interpret the data towards pre-conceived notions or something that will be media-buzzworthy. There’s also an interesting section describing a collaboration with an anthropologist who studied what happens at a research institute and compares it to “a Georgian house, where this is a clear hierarchy of people, and set rooms for set tasks. The overall task of the house is to turn nature into science…”

 

Another potential take-home message from the book is that collaboration leads to better outcomes but there’s a caveat: The collaborators need to have similar levels of competency and also similar levels of confidence. There’s also some evidence that diversity improves the outcome. The experiments described are limited so I don’t know how well those conclusions extend to broader settings, but I’m certainly seeing the business world use these ideas to create buzz. I also liked how the Friths’ conclusion, as psychologists, that most people are instinctively nice (because of reputation and group dynamics) in contrast to a purely homo economicus view.  But they also acknowledge that in-group and out-group factors can complicate things.

 

Overall, if learning about the brain, cognition, and social psychology, is something you’re interested in, I recommend Two Heads. It’s an engaging book that threads the needle between giving you the details (without being overwhelming) and the big picture (with examples that you might care about). Overall two thumbs up.

Immaterial Science

As often happens while looking for one thing, I stumble across something (mostly) unrelated. Today’s edition is the Journal of Immaterial Science. Totally satirical, dorky, funny, it has something for (almost) every chemist. The articles are short, and many of them are appropriately labeled Miscommunications or Illiterature Reviews! I skimmed a few of them and here are some of my highlights.

 

Since Halloween was yesterday, I decided to read a “Proposed Detection of Ghosts with MS-SPOOKY”. The abstract: “You could shoot ghosts on a mass spec. Maybe.” The article begins by arguing that “to prove the existence of ghosts is a key value to modern society”. There’s no doubt that many folks are interested in this topic. I’ve even blogged about it (several times). And if Mary Roach has written about the afterlife, you can bet there’s interest. The SPOOKY stands for “spectral presence origin-omics kinetic yield”. Unfortunately there’s no scientific detail in the article about how SPOOKY works except for a vacuum inlet to suck up the ghosts and trap them.

 

Given my interests in astrobiology, I particularly enjoyed reading “Triphenylphosphine Oxide in the Clouds of Venus”. Various programs and telescopes have been given names and acronyms. The ALMA array is rechristened “Alien Life Molestation Array”. Haha! The article criticizes the ballyhoo about phosphine detection by discussing the problem of bias, specifically the “Cox bias, whereby the larger the telescope one uses for a study the more important it is to accompany the paper with a press-release that may be talked about by science communicators in the media.” The overall detection project is dubbed “Mission Imphossible”! When the P-31 NMR data shows a strong signal, it is assigned to “that most pernicious of impurities: triphenylphosphine oxide”. (Actual chemistry: it’s difficult to remove in a mixture via chromatography.) And if there’s some data you cannot explain, it must be attributed to Aliens!

 

As a theoretical chemist who often reads philosophy of science and history of science, I was amused by “Toward a Science of Dumbassery: A Theoretical Perspective”. There’s a tongue-in-cheek paragraph about philosophy of science that actually has some critical substance (of course, it’s also funny). Then the authors get down to business by trying to define dumbassery and notes that it seems to be observed where its opposite (intelligence) can be found. Cognitive neuroscience and genetics get thrown into the mix. Did I mention one of the authors is “Francis Crock… a cell biologist with an underwhelming grasp on statistics”?

 

There are lots of chemical structures and reaction schemes in many of the articles. Synthetic chemists might enjoy “Applications of Cursed Chemistry in the Total Synthesis of Impracticatechol”. Medicinal chemists might want to know about “Chemical Frenetics: Party Drugs as Organocatalysts” which provides tweetable reaction yields (see table below). And there are a bunch of pictures in “Extreme Titrations” showing folks doing titrations in extreme environments. There’s poetry and song (“an ode to triphenylphosphine oxide”). And that’s just the first edition.

 

Volume 2 was recently released. I enjoyed “The Flatom: A Novel Atomic Theory Inspired by a Flat Earth”. “The Lost Molecules of M.C. Escher” includes fractaldehydes, not to mention there’s an article on “A Total Synthesis of Tesseractane”. And John Dalton’s alter ego is profiled in “Don Jalton – A Forgotten Pioneer of Atomic Theory”. Structural biochemists will nod knowingly with “X-Ray Crystallomancy: A Practical Guide” – it’s particularly good with figures including ancient symbols and star clusters. And much, much more. It can be a black hole. I only allowed myself an hour of skimming through the articles after which I’m determined not to look at any more details. [TRIGGER Warning:] It’s a black hole of chemical proportions.