science review for december 2009
Now that I’ve sufficiently recovered from the New Year celebrations, let’s see what did the humanity learn in the past month.
In chemistry, carbonic acid, H2CO3, was finally observed experimentally in solution. Speaking of simple targets, a teraherz study of water showed that dissolved ions neither weaken nor strengthen water’s structure, and yet another study of caged water clusters showed how some can dry up and get rehydrated back. Another entertaining non-nano chemistry work, cyclooctatetraene was forcibly planarized and the resulting antiaromatic molecule studied experimentally. Closer to my interests, solid-state NMR can now be used to determine structures of nontrivial proteins and a new solution NMR sequence, HN(COCA)HAHB, was developed to study unfolded proteins. Finally someone seriously cares about coupling constants in protein structure analysis.
In non-nano physics, mass of top quark has been ascertained to about 1% error. And in a rather groundbreaking quantum physics news, the 40 year old hypothesis of the universality of Efimov trimers has been experimentally shown to be true last month by the Hulet atom cooling lab in Rice U (cute picture of a high-five from Efimov to Hulet there). The first Efimov trimer itself was only observed in 2006, but this group confirmed the universality property and even observed Efimov tetramers.
In biology, airflow inside dog’s nose was studied: we now know that they smell with each nostril separately (like we hear sounds with each ear separately), and that they do not exhale scent when exhaling air. Microbiologists now know of a new giant virus from amoebae, although it doesn’t surpass Mimivirus. Another group, while studying rock-breathing bacteria, figured out how they create biological “wires” that pass through the cell wall and conduct electricity between the cell and the rock.
Psychology had a couple if interesting findings: a group of Swedish psychologists noticed that the time it takes for a newborn mammal to walk can be exactly calculated based on adult brain mass and gestation time, and that humans are not at all exceptional in their motor development. In more practical news, NYU psychologists demonstrated on human subjects that it’s possible to completely erase fear attached to a memory if it is modified at reconsolidation time, as was known to be possible in rats (if you didn’t know, after we recall any memory, there’s a moment a few minutes later when it is being reassembled to be put back in permanent storage, and it can be forever modified or even erased at that point). Speaking of memory, someone at Case Western studying short-term memory managed to store information in vitro, in pieces of mammalian brain tissue.
Astronomers finally found an unambiguous example of a pair-instability supernova, in another galaxy, naturally. In less distant news, Cassini was able to get a good look at the humongous planet-wide hexagonal cloud on Saturn, first spotted back in the 1980s by Voyager.
And finally, in geology, the old and somewhat disputed deep mantle plume hypothesis gained solid experimental support with a new study of Hawaiian hot spot.
Also, in case you feel guilty about drinking champagne at New Year’s eve, it is just as good at preventing cardiovascular disease as red wine 
Almost forgot, last month’s animal behavior brought us the tool-using octopus and the explosive duck erections!
Crossposted from LiveJournal