I posted a video with some thoughts on Dune and Nootropics. I also came up with a cocktail inspired by the book. I am in love with this cocktail. The 2021 film is coming out soon on HBO(!) so if you want to make this for your screening, here’s the recipe:
Spiced Tequila Sour Of Shai Hulud (May His Passing Cleanse the World):
Assemble in a shaker with ice:
1.5 oz Corzo Silver Tequila (for the memory of the desert sands of Dune) 0.75 oz ginger syrup* (to stimulate the mind) 0.75 oz fresh lemon juice (it gives its body’s water that the tribe may survive) Two dashes cinnamon bitters (for the Spice must flow)
Shake
Place a large, clear ice cube in a glass. Add one bar spoon of blue curacao (for the blue within blue eyes of the fremen). Strain the drink over the cube and serve.
*To make ginger syrup: Assemble 0.5 cup sugar, 0.5 cup water and ~4 ounces of sliced fresh ginger in a pot, heat over medium heat while stirring until the sugar dissolves and the mixture just starts to bubble. Strain into a bottle for storage.
I got to thinking about humanized organisms while I was reading about hydra. Hydra make good models to study the biology of aging because they seem to be immortal: they don’t seem to age at all. If we knew how they accomplished it, it might help us understand how to slow aging. How do we know that they don’t age?
Prof. Daniel Martinez observed groups of hydra for years. He carefully fed them and kept them in separate tubes. Each one was observed making buds – little baby hydra – but the old hydra was put into a fresh tube alone every time. The researchers waited for any of them to get old and die… and none did. Well, maybe they didn’t wait long enough? We can only compare them to other creatures in the same weight class.
Longevity tracks body size and time to first offspring. So orcas (weight 1 million grams, first offspring at 25 years) live far longer than voles (weight 10 grams, first offspring within a few weeks of birth). Hydra weigh in at a fraction of a gram and have their first offspring a few days after being born. But they are still alive and reproducing for years, thousands of times longer than the trend would predict.
What allows hydra to accomplish this? How do they regenerate? What’s special about their stem cells that they don’t deplete? Can we study hydra in a way that’s relevant to human longevity?
Killifish are really interesting organisms for scientific experiments. They are vertebrates, so they are closer to us genetically than insects or worms. But they are a lot easier to grow and care for then mice or rats. Some killifish have life spans of only three months. This makes them very attractive as aging model animals. If treatment extends their lifespan, you only have to wait 3 months to find out. With mice, you have to wait for several years. This paper discusses another cool feature of the killifish model animal. Some kinds of killifish can go into a kind of suspended animation. I did not know that and it is fascinating.
This article discusses a new composite silicon/carbon material for hosting lithium ions. Cramming lithium ions into a silicon matrix makes for an even higher energy battery than a standard lithium-ion battery. unfortunately, silicon expands under these conditions and can destroy the battery. By incorporating the silicon into a carbon matrix, these researchers increase the conductivity and the resilience of the battery to multiple charger Cycles. The result was a very nice paper. I love that they tried to make their composite material from readily available substances.
Why do we go gray after stress? Linkages between nerves and stem cells in our hair follicles! This happened to me in the month before my dissertation: I got gray in my beard. So strange.
This weekend I grew some potassium phosphate crystals with amaranth dye. I did this back in 2001 in Bart Kahr’s O-Chem class and remembered it recently. It’s a fun demonstration of the chemistry of crystal growth, the different chemistry of the crystal faces, and it’s pretty. I found Prof. Kahr’s paper[1] that gives a “foolproof recipe” and it did not disappoint. Even this fool could make it work.
As the crystals grow, each face of the crystal has a unique topology. The corners are growing with a different spacing of atoms than the faces, and the faces can be different from each other. Sometimes, the faces have the right spacing to allow a dye molecule to stick. In this case, there is a big difference between how well amaranth dye sticks to each face. So as the crystal rows, it only gets dyed in two quadrants.
We can learn about chemistry from crystals
Crystals are super useful to chemists. A good crystal of a chemical can be used to get x-ray diffraction data on the structure of the chemical. The most detailed structures are derived from x-ray diffraction data.
Knowing how molecules assemble into crystals is also really important to materials scientists. If you want to design a material from its atoms, you need to know how they are going to come together. I’ve been working on making an iron battery and reading up on battery chemistry. One of the interesting papers I read talked about designing a cathode material to hold sodium atoms. The chemists designed the “holes” in the structure to hold sodium atoms – and they needed to know how the other atoms would come together to make that shape.
Why chemically dyed crystals are cool
Of course, dyed crystals just look cool. Maybe that’s silly, but if you’re trying to teach organic chemistry, it’s good to have something visual and striking to hold on to. A lot of O-chem is solvents and white powder, so anything that sticks in the memory is a help.
The other reason I think that dyed crystals are so cool is that they dyes can be held still very precisely. One of prof. Kahr’s later papers used a crystal to hold a fluorescent dye in place at a specific orientation. Then they used a fluorescence microscope to look at single dye molecules[2]. I think that’s just really cool. I gather that they are more stable in the crystal than they are in solution.
I also made a time-lapse movie of the crystallization
2.Wustholz, K. L., Kahr, B. & Reid, P. J. Single-Molecule Orientations in Dyed Salt Crystals. J. Phys. Chem. B109, 16357–16362 (2005).http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jp053051x
Dr. Peter B Allen - Lab Blog 
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