Tag: allotrope

This is the best new year resolution you can make

Akshat Rathi4 Comments

New year resolutions should be about multiplying your strengths, while making a note of your weaknesses

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Soon many of us will be tempted to make new year resolutions. Perhaps you’ve been egged on by someone who successfully managed to keep theirs. Or perhaps that reflection time you got over the Christmas break has made you renew old resolutions with more, well, resolve. Or maybe it’s just that you need those resolutions because you don’t want to appear lazy.

Rationally speaking, any given time of the year should be a good time to make resolutions. But the new year tempts us to believe that it is instead the best time for resolution-making. It’s marked by celebrations with friends and family, who often have advice on which resolutions work and which don’t. Some even have tips on how to make sure you stick to them.

We should all strive to make good resolutions. But most new year resolutions we make are just terrible. Here are the most positive results I could find in the scientific literature on new year resolutions: a 1989 study in the journal Addictive Behaviours showed that

77% participants kept their primary resolutions for one week. 55% for one month. 40% for six months. These success rates were probably elevated because of volunteer composition, self-reporting and study’s demand characteristics.

Even without the caveat, the research says that nearly half of all participants were not even able to stick to their primary (ie the most important) resolution after a month.

Psychologists find that the most common reason we cannot stick to our new year resolutions is because we choose resolutions that are radically different from our current lifestyle. For instance, the most common resolutions are to exercise every day or, in case of smokers, to stop smoking altogether.

At the heart of keeping resolutions is the art of self-control that decades of study have shown is a limited resource. The sort of new year resolutions we choose tend to require a lot of self-control, which means they are also the easiest to give up.

And, even if we leave science aside, I contend that nothing more than your own personal history of sticking to new year resolutions is needed to convince you why this year’s resolutions should be different. So what’s the alternative?

The better thing to do is to resolve to multiply what you are already good at. In any given year, however good or bad it has been, there will always be things that you did that worked quite well and vice versa. The good bits may have come to you naturally, or maybe you had to work really hard to get to them. Either way, to better what you’re already good at is easier and requires less self-control to achieve. It may also bring in more positive results than you think.

When we make resolutions, we solely focus on our weak points. That is of course what we think will bring us the most gain. If we were able to stick to our resolutions, working on the weaknesses would indeed bring huge gains. But because our resolutions fail so easily, it is better to choose the low-hanging fruit for now.

This is not to say that you should not aim to make fundamental positive changes to your lifestyle. You should but you would be more successful if you choose to do that later on in the year. All the articles coming your way about new year resolutions would be better used then!

Insulin pill may soon be a reality

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Daily jabs of insulin are a painful reality for many with diabetes. That may change if researchers who have successfully tested oral insulin in rats are able to replicate those results in humans.

Nearly 350m people worldwide suffer from diabetes and that number is predicted to grow to more than 500m by 2030. While the more common form, type-2 diabetes, does not always need insulin treatment, nearly quarter of all diabetes patients depend on insulin jabs. Oral insulin’s estimated annual sales could be somewhere between $8 billion and $17 billion.

The benefits of an insulin pill are more than just ease of taking the drug. The pill will mean that patients can start taking insulin earlier in the development of the disease, which could reduce some of the secondary complications, which can include blindness and impaired healing that leads to amputations.

The idea of oral insulin has been around since the 1930s, but the difficulties of making it seemed too big to overcome. First, insulin is a protein – when it comes in contact with stomach enzymes, it is quickly destroyed. Second, if insulin can pass through the stomach safely, it is too big a molecule (about 30 times the size of aspirin) to be absorbed into the bloodstream, where it needs to be in order to regulate blood-sugar levels.

Sanyog Jain at India’s National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research and his colleagues have been working on delivering insulin in the oral form for many years. Their first fully-successful attempt came in 2012, when they developed a formulation that successfully controlled blood-sugar level in rats. But the materials used were too expensive to consider commercialising the technology.

Now, in a paper published in the journal Biomacromolecules, they have found a cheaper and more reliable way of delivering insulin. They overcome the two main hurdles by, first, packing insulin in tiny sacs made of lipids (fats), and, second, attaching to it folic acid (vitamin B9) to help improve its absorption into the bloodstream.

The lipids they use are cheap and have been successfully employed to deliver other drugs before. These help to protect insulin from being digested by stomach enzymes, which gets it to the small intestine. When the lipid-covered sacs enter the small intestine, special cells on its lining called microfold cells are attracted to the folic acid in them. The folic acid helps activate a transport mechanism that can let big molecules pass through into the blood. The amount of folic acid used in the formulation also seems to be in the safe region.

In rats, Jain’s formulation was as effective as injected insulin, although the relative amounts that entered the blood stream differed. However, it was better in one key aspect. Whereas the effects of an injection are quickly lost (in less than 6 to 8 hours), Jain’s formulation helped control blood-sugar level for more than 18 hours.

The most important part of the research comes after successful testing in animals – the formulation needs to be given to human volunteers. But, Jain said, “at a government institute like ours, we don’t have the sort of money needed for clinical trials.”

He may not have to wait for long, as big pharma companies have been searching for an insulin pill formulation for decades. Two of them, Danish pharma giant Novo Nordisk and Israeli upstart Oramed are in a race to come up with a solution. Google’s venture capital arm, Google Ventures, recently invested $10m in Rani Therapeutics with the hope it will help develop oral insulin. Indian firm Biocon also does oral insulin research, and it recently signed an agreement with pharma giant Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Oramed is ahead, with their oral insulin product soon to enter phase-II clinical trials, which is the most advanced stage any oral insulin formulation has ever reached. Its chief scientist, Miriam Kidron, said of Jain’s research: “Most people have the same basic idea to develop an insulin pill, but its the little differences that will determine ultimate success.”

While Kidron did not reveal Oramed’s formulation, she said, “we attempted liposomal delivery before, just like Jain’s work, but we weren’t successful.” She warned that translating success from rats to humans is very difficult. And she is right – most drugs have a high cull-rate at each stage of their development. Even so, research like Jain’s give hope that an insulin pill may not remain a dream for long.The Conversation

First published at The Conversation.

Turning salt into exotic chemicals under high pressure

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Everything around you is made of elements that scientists have studied in quite some detail over the last 200 years. But all that understanding breaks down when these elements are subjected to high pressure and temperature. Now, using an advanced theoretical understanding and extreme conditions, researchers have converted table salt into exotic chemicals.

Salt is made from one part sodium (Na) and one part chlorine (Cl). If somehow salt were transported to the centre of the Earth, where the pressure is three million times that on the surface, its crystalline structure would change but the ratio of those two elements would remain the same.

Vitali Prakapenka at the University of Chicago and his colleagues wanted to find out what happens if there were an excess of either sodium or chlorine at such high pressures. Would the ratio between the elements change? “It might,” said Prakapenka, “because chemistry completely changes in such conditions.” If it did, the result would not just be formation of a new compound, but a serious revision of what we think about chemistry.

Elemental behaviour changes at such high pressures. For example, molecules of oxygen, which normally contain two atoms, break down at increased pressures, and the element forms an eight-atom box. Raise the pressure some more to about 300,000 atmospheres, and it starts to superconduct. Chemists are trying to develop chemicals that exhibit similar properties but are stable under normal conditions – learning about these exotic compounds can help them achieve that goal.

Sodium chloride (NaCl ie table salt) is a different beast. It is bound in a one-to-one ratio by very strong ionic bonds. However, calculations done by Prakapenka’s colleague and lead researcher Artem Oganov at the State University of New York in Stony Brook indicated that even sodium chloride could be twisted to produce exotic chemicals. Those calculations, just published in the journal Science, gave them precise pressures at which, in presence of excess sodium or chlorine, salt could be transformed.

The calculations indicated that NaCl3, Na3Cl, Na2Cl, Na3Cl2, and NaCl7 could all be stable at pressures ranging from 20GPa to 142GPa, where 1GPa is about 10,000 atmospheres of pressure. High pressure physicists have many models to predict behaviour of elements under extreme conditions, but rarely do those models agree with experiment.

Remarkably their calculations stood the test of experiment in at least two cases: Na3Cl and NaCl3. To run such an experiment, you need a fancy device called the diamond anvil cell. Chemicals are added between two diamonds, which can be compressed to produce pressures up to 300GPa. This is what Prakapenka’s colleague used to make Na3Cl and NaCl3, structures that were verified by Prakapenka using X-ray analysis.

“Nobody thought this could happen, given how strong the bond is between sodium and chlorine,” said Prakapenka. “What we have shown is that theory can be translated into experiment, which doesn’t happen often in high pressure physics.”

Malcolm McMahon, professor of high pressure physics at the University of Edinburgh, said, “These are surprising results, and they are guided by remarkable theoretical predictions. Without tools like the ones they have built, we would not have been able to think that sodium chloride could be transformed this way.”

There may not be any immediate application for these results. Instead, the researchers have opened the doors for scientists to start probing other chemicals in the hope of making exotic combinations that can remain stable at room temperature. Diamonds are a good example of that. In nature, they are formed deep inside the Earth when carbon is subjected to extreme pressure. Once formed, they remain stable even at ambient conditions. So there may be other diamond-like materials that we can make, ones that our current understanding of chemistry hasn’t even predicted could exist.

Other implications are non-terrestrial. Each planet in our Solar System and beyond has a lot of material held at extreme pressures. For example, Jupiter is predicted to have metallic hydrogen, where hydrogen’s electrons are free to move as they please. This material is expected to be a superconductor at room temperature. Understanding how chemicals we know about behave in those conditions would be vital to predicting the conditions in the host of exoplanets we are discovering.

If nothing else, Oganov and Prakapenka’s work shows that even something as simple as table salt can be successfully transformed – meaning we still have much to discover about the elements that we all know (and some of us love).The Conversation

First published at The Conversation.

Image credit: richard_jones