A perfect Bloody Mary on a Sunday morning could be the best thing that ever happened to the human race. It's tangy, it's sweet, it's spicy...and there's alcohol.

Need I say more? Flavor chemist Neil C. Da Costa's latest project is to investigate the taste sensations created by Bloody Mary ingredients and create tips for making the best Bloody Mary humanly possible.

At an American Chemical Society meeting, Da Costa described the drink:"The Bloody Mary has been called the world's most complex cocktail, and from the standpoint of flavor chemistry, you've got a blend of hundreds of flavor compounds that act on the taste senses. It covers almost the entire range of human taste sensations—sweet, salty, sour and umami or savory—but not bitter."

The flavors come from the ingredients, of course:

• tomato juice
• Worcestershire and Tabasco
• lemon or lime juice
• horseradish
• black pepper
• celery salt
• garnish: celery and lemon wedge

Most ingredient have both a key flavor volatile, an aroma chemical that evaporates out from the drink, and a a key flavor non-volatile, a specific taste. Aroma chemicals and taste work together to produce the divine experience of drinking a Bloody Mary. So without further adieu, a chemist's tips for producing the the best Bloody Mary on the planet:

Step 1 Use fresh ingredients.

Fresh cut lemon, fresh shaved horseradish, and fresh blended tomatoes...what's better? According to chemists, fresh ingredients produce the strongest and most true possible aroma and taste.

Step 2 Drink it quickly.

 The blend of ingredients in a Bloody Mary is 'highly unstable' chemically, and will start to taste different 30 minutes after its blended. So, make small drinks or drink it quick for best flavor.

Step 3 Supplement your mixes.

If you have to use a mix, throw fresh ingredients in to enhance flavor and aroma. Always use fresh cut lemon/lime, at least.

Step 4 Use quality tomato juice.

A Bloody Mary is mostly tomato juice, so go premium to get the rich flavor you're looking for. Campbell's, Knudson, or Welch's are rumored to be among the best.

Step 5 Use cheap vodka.

The intense, spicy, tangy flavor of a Bloody Mary chemically overpowers the flavor of the vodka, so don't waste your money on premium vodka.

Photos by Phoenix New Times and Intraffic

Via The Chemistry of a Perfect Bloody Mary on WonderHowTo.

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Dow Chemical execs assured banks at a recent investor's day that a new recession would hurt them less than the old recession.

Here's the main argument via Barclays, which offers a neutral rating on the stock:

Dow has seen demand growth slow over the last couple of months; however, it is not nearly as severe as the slowdown in 2008/'09. Dow believes lower inventory levels and struggling markets would mean a normally viewed recession would not cause the level of demand decline seen in '09. Dow's demand "heat map" shows deteriorating demand levels across markets in the last 3 months. Not surprisingly, construction and transportation have seen the strongest slowdown among industries. While all regions are reporting some slowdown, one region appearing to hold up well is China. Dow attributes this to continuing middle class growth and urbanization.

Don't miss: 10 reasons everyone is freaking out right now >

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Like it or not—and this one’s really hard to like—we all have a negativity bias. While we appreciate positive experiences, we are much more finely attuned and give much greater weight to negative experiences like fear, threats, or even just bad news.

According to neuropsychologist Rich Hanson, our "brain is like Velcro to negative experiences and Teflon to positive ones.”

Or as my non-neuropsychologist dad used to say, “It takes five pats on the back to make up for one, ‘Oh, crap.’”

That’s also why we tend to dwell on what other people do wrong. Every mistake, every misstep, and every slight is like a threat or potential loss, if only to our self-esteem.

As Hanson writes, we’re built that way: Negative stimuli produce more neural activity than positive stimuli. Negative events are also quickly stored in your long-term memory while you need to actively think about positive events for twelve seconds or more in order for them to be transferred to your long-term memory.

And that’s why an otherwise good day can be so easily spoiled. We give tremendous weight to negativity.

And so do the people around us—especially the people we work with and are close to, because to them our words and actions already carry substantial weight.

But we can fight back. Tomorrow let's all try an experiment. Make it a “No Negatives Day.” Commit to focusing on the positive and discarding negative thoughts or feelings as quickly as possible.

Granted, that won’t be easy. We have centuries of evolution to overcome.

One trick is to take on a difficult task, because when we focus on something mentally challenging, our brains divert resources that were previously devoted to experiencing a negative emotion. (That’s one occasion where our inability to multitask effectively is actually a good thing.)

Shankar Vedantam suggests performing a quick mental exercise when you get upset. Count backwards from 100 in steps of seven. Multiply 14 times 23. Try to remember the lines of a poem you memorized in school. When you do, you “forget” to be angry or sad: It’s like counting to 10, only harder.

Another trick is to just pause for a second and apply a little perspective. Even though they sometimes do hurt your feelings, your family loves you. Even though they do occasionally make mistakes, your employees and coworkers accomplish amazing things.

Even though you had to wait a couple minutes longer than you wanted for the check, your meal was superb.

Tomorrow, do your absolute best to focus only on the good. Dwell on every positive thing that happens for at least 10 or 20 seconds. Make sure the experience transfers to your long-term memory. If something really bad happens, do a little mental exercise and then toss in a dose of perspective to help you calm down and refocus.

Just as importantly, don't say anything bad about anyone or anything. No gossip, no snippy comments, no complaints... only positives. That will not only help you feel better, it will help others feel better too.

Then tell people what you’re doing. Ask them to hold you accountable. Ask them to adhere to No Negatives Day, too. Turn it into a game that everyone wins.

While all of our lives could be better, the lives we’re already living are pretty amazing. If only for one day, fight your negativity bias and let yourself—and the people around you—enjoy what we have.

This post originally appeared at Inc. 

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Researchers have created a genre of plastics that change color to warn of wounds and heal themselves when exposed to light, as reported by EurekAlert!.

The new plastic, introduced at the 243^rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), issues a red signal when damaged and then renews itself when exposed to ordinary sunlight or visible light from a light bulb.

Normally when plastic is scratched or cracked, the long chains of chemicals that link the material together break and change shape.

The researchers, led by Marek W. Urban, Ph.D., tweaked the chain links so that changes in shape produce a red splotch around defects and light causes the links to reform while the red mark disappears.

The technology introduces a wide range of applications because it could endow numerous products such as cell phones, laptops, cars and planes with self-repairing surfaces.

From EurekAlert!:

Scratches in automobile fenders, for instance, might be repaired by simply exposing the fender to intense light. Critical structural parts in aircraft might warn of damage by turning red along cracks so that engineers could decide whether to shine the light and heal the damage or undertake a complete replacement of the component. And there could be a range of applications in battlefield weapons systems.

Other self-healing plastics are made of potentially toxic ingredients and rely on embedded healing compounds that can self-repair only once.

The new plastic is produced by a water-based process and can heal itself over and over again.

Urban's team of researchers is now working on incorporating the technology into plastics that can withstand high temperatures.

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Curiosity, the new Mars rover, is essentially a mobile chemistry lab decked out with instruments to analyze soil samples from the red planet to test for microbial life. Watch the video above to get a better idea of just how much this huge machine can do. One really cool thing that I'm excited about: The rover will beam back 3D images of the Martian surface!

The video was created by Kirk Zamieroski and produced by the American Chemical Society. From the YouTube description:

After an epic 354-million-mile trek through space, the Mars Curiosity Rover is zooming along at 13,000 miles per hour toward a scheduled Aug. 6 landing on the Red Planet to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. We took a visit to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to talk to the Mars Science Laboratory Deputy Scientist, Ashwin Vasavada, who gave us a look "under the hood" of the rover, explaining the role of the analytical chemistry instruments found onboard Curiosity. Curiosity's primary mission goal is to determine the habitability of the Gale Crater, which scientists believe was once filled with water. Curiosity is basically an entire chemistry lab packed into a one mobile unit, equipped with the tools necessary to test the chemical composition of soil. Test results from these instruments will pave the way for future Mars missions, and may provide insight in the search for life on other planets.

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A new system to detect chemical warfare attacks can identify incredibly low levels of dangerous toxins in the air by their sound.

The new technique can detect multiple dangerous chemicals in the air using a phenomenon called the photoacoustic effect, which is when materials generate specific sound waves when they absorb light. Researchers use lasers as the light source and very sensitive microphones to pick up the sounds that chemicals make.

With this system researchers could detect tiny amounts of gasses, down to parts per trillion levels. The problem? They could only scan for one compound at a time.

"Photoacoustics is an excellent analytic tool, but is somewhat limited in the sense that one traditionally only measures one absorption parameter at a time," says Kristan Gurton, an experimental physicist at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Md, said in a statement from the Optical Society of America. 

Instead of using traditional photoacoustic set ups, Gurton created a sensor that can detect the different sounds put off by multiple different chemical weapons when they are struck with six different lasers. Each laser has a different effect when it hits the molecules of gas, creating a distinct set of sounds for each chemical.

"Different agents will affect the relative 'loudness' of each tone," Gurton said, "so for one gas, some tones will be louder than others, and it is these differences that allow for species identification." The work will be published in the August 15 issue of the journal Optics Letters.

Ultimately the method "could be tailored for a variety of detection scenarios ranging from the obvious need to protect our soldiers during conflict to civilian applications like detecting the presence of harmful chemical gases that are difficult to detect with conventional techniques," Gurton says.

The technology is surprisingly portable, it could be shrunk down to the size of a milk carton for soldiers to carry with them. "A photoacoustic cell is surprisingly simple and inexpensive to produce," Gurton adds.

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A chemist who tested more than 60,000 drug samples submitted in the cases of about 34,000 defendants over nine years has admitted to faking drug sample results, according to a police report obtained by the Associated Press.

The revelations about the chemist, Annie Dookhan, who is also accused of having fabricated a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Massachusetts, throws thousands of criminal cases into question because of tampered evidence and the fact that she testified in about 150 criminal cases since 2009 while claiming false credentials.

"I screwed up big time," Dookhan said, according to the report by investigators for Attorney General Martha Coakley's office obtained by the AP. "I messed up bad. It's my fault. I don't want the lab to get in trouble."

The AP also reports that supervisors at the Boston lab, which was closed by police in August, may face federal scrutiny because they did not intervene after lab employees reported concerns about Dookhan's work.

“I can’t imagine she could have been this corrupt without someone noticing,” Attorney Rosemary Scapicchio, who represents several defendants whose samples Dookhan handled, told the AP. “The investigation needs to go deeper than Annie Dookhan to get to the point of ‘How did she get away with it?’”

The Boston Globe reports that the office of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has identified 1,141 inmates in Massachusetts jails and prisons convicted based on evidence handled by Dookhan, who was also the quality control officer in the lab.

"I intentionally turned a negative sample into a positive a few times," Dookhan said in a signed statement she gave police.

She also admitted to identifying drug samples by looking at them instead of testing them, contaminating samples to get more work finished and saying drug evidence was heavier than it actually was, according to the AP.

Authorities have not filed criminal charges against Dookhan or commented on her possible motives.

SEE ALSO: Penn State Investigator Louis Freeh Accused Of Heading A Massive Cover-Up As Director Of FBI >

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After nine years in a laboratory, Japanese scientists announced on Wednesday that they finally created element 113, an element that does not occur naturally on Earth. At least, they're pretty sure they did. 

The same team thought they had created the elusive element back in 2004, but the evidence was not conclusive. This time researchers say they have "unambiguous proof."

Element 113, an atom that has 113 protons in its nucleus, is temporarily named Ununtrium, meaning one-one-three.    

Element 113 is not the heaviest atom ever created, but has proven extremely difficult to synthesize because it is very unstable and decays almost immediately. 

To synthesize element 113 researchers used a giant atom smasher at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based Science in Japan. Jon Bardin of The Los Angeles Times explains:

The researchers collided zinc, which has 30 protons, with bismuth, which has 83. The result was an atom with 113 protons in its nucleus, the researchers say.

But the new element quickly decayed. Observing the nature of the decay is crucial to proving the identity of the new element. [Lead researcher] Morita says the decay data indicate that the collision did indeed create a 113-proton element, though the evidence has not yet been peer-reviewed.

The discovery still needs to be verified, but if the formula holds up, it will be the first time an Asian team created a new element, and as a result, gets to choose a permanent name for that element.  The decision will be made by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, the agency that regulates such things.   

Twenty different elements, including super-heavy element 118, have been made since 1940. With the latest discovery, Morita said in a statement that he now hopes to create "element 119 and beyond."

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In your dreams, you’re the star of your own movie—and your subconscious often has you performing stunts that would put Tom Cruise to shame.

But even if you’re swinging around the top of the Burj Khalifa in your dream, you stay put in real life. This is thanks to a little thing called sleep paralysis, which keeps you locked in place while you slumber so you don’t hurt yourself.

Until recently, scientists understood little about how sleep paralysis works; figuring it out could shed light on disorders such as narcolepsy and REM sleep disorder, and researchers at the University of Toronto might be close to understanding how the phenomenon occurs.

For healthy people, sleep paralysis occurs during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, and they are blissfully unaware that it’s even happening.

But for some narcoleptics, falling asleep or waking up makes sleep paralysis kick in, creating a terrifying state where the mind is awake, but the body cannot move. The paralysis can last several seconds or even minutes, with rare cases lasting for hours.

To get a better understanding of what causes sleep paralysis in REM, Patricia Brooks and John Peever at the University of Toronto monitored the electrical activity in rats’ facial muscles, triggered by trigeminal motor neurons sending messages to the brain (basically, they looked at what causes sleeping rats to chew while asleep).

In an effort to stop sleep paralysis, they blocked the neurotransmitters they thought were responsible for the phenomenon—ionotropic GABAA/glycine receptors—but sleep paralysis still occurred. Next, Peever and Brooks tried blocking the GABAA/glycine ionotropic receptors and the metabotropic GABAB—which did, in fact, stop sleep paralysis, meaning that both gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and glycine must be present and working together to cause sleep paralysis.

“Understanding the precise mechanism behind these chemicals’ role in REM sleep disorder is particularly important because about 80 percent of people who have it eventually develop a neurodegenerative disease, such as Parkinson’s disease,” Peever says. “REM sleep behavior disorder could be an early marker of these diseases, and curing it may help prevent or even stop their development.”

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US chemists Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka won the Nobel Prize on Wednesday for identifying a class of cell receptor, yielding vital insights into how the body works at the molecular level.

The award is for chemistry but the big beneficiary is medical research, the Nobel committee declared.

The pair were honoured for discovering a key component of cells called G-protein-coupled receptors and mapping how they work.

The receptors stud the surface of cells, sensitising them to light, flavour, smells and body chemicals such as adrenaline and enabling cells to communicate with each other.

About a thousand of these kinds of receptor are known to exist throughout the body. They are essential not just for physiological processes but also for response to drugs.

"About half of all medications achieve their effect through G-protein-coupled receptors," the Nobel jury said.

Understanding the receptors provides the tools for "better drugs with fewer side effects," Nobel committee member Sven Lidin said.

Lefkowitz, 69, is a professor of biomedicine and biochemistry at Duke University in North Carolina, while Kobilka, born in 1955, is a professor of molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford University School of Medicine in California.

In a teleconference with Swedish journalists, Lefkowitz admitted he had not heard the phone ring to get the famous piece of news.

"I was fast asleep and the phone rang. I did not hear it. I must share with you that I wear ear plugs to sleep, and so my wife gave me an elbow: 'phone for you.' And there it was. A total shock and surprise," he said.

Lefkowitz admitted that his day had been thrown out of whack.

"As yet we've told nobody," he said. "I plan to go to the office. I was going to get a haircut, which if you could see me is quite a necessity, but I'm afraid (that) will probably have to be postponed.

"I think it'll be a crazy day at the office."

Kobilka meanwhile told Swedish news agency TT he was also awakened in the middle of the night at his home in California.

Asked if he would be able to fall back to sleep, he replied: "I don't think so."

"I'm still very surprised, they called me just an half hour ago, but now it is starting to slowly sink in," he said.

Kobilka said he had not yet decided what he would do with his half of the eight million Swedish kronor ($1.2 million, 930,000 euros) prize sum.

"I don't know. I have two children and hopefully they will inherit some of it. I'm not really used to my work being recognised like this," he added.

Mark Sansom, a professor of molecular biophysics at the University of Oxford, said the receptors "have for a long time been the holy grail of membrane protein research."

"They are fundamental to regulation of many physiological processes, from the nervous system to taste and smell," he told the Science Media Centre in London.

"They are also a major class of drug target and are incredibly important to the pharmaceutical industry."

On Monday, Shinya Yamanaka of Japan and John Gurdon of Britain won the Nobel Medicine Prize for work in cell programming, a frontier that has raised dreams of replacement tissue for people crippled by disease.

On Tuesday, the physics prize went to France's Serge Haroche and David Wineland for research in quantum physics that could one day open the way to supercomputers.

The literature prize will be announced on Thursday, followed Friday by perhaps the most-watched award, for peace. The economics prize wraps up the Nobel season on Monday.

The laureates will receive their prizes at formal ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on December 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.

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Radium was discovered by Marie Curie and her husband Pierre in 1898.

In 1903, the Royal Academy of Sciences awarded Marie and Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel the Nobel Prize in Physics, making Marie the first woman to win the prize.

Later, in 1911, she would win her second Nobel for isolating radium, discovering another element (polonium), and for her research into the new phenomenon of radioactivity, a word she coined herself.

By 1910, radium was manufactured synthetically in the U.S. But before the effects of radiation exposure were well understood, radium ended up in a lot of crazy places for its purported magical healing properties and its glow-in-the-dark novelty.

1. In Chocolate

Food products containing radium, like the Radium Schokolade chocolate bar manufactured by Burk & Braun and Hippman-Blach bakery’s Radium Bread, made with radium water, were popular overseas until they were discontinued in 1936.

2. In Water

Radium water crocks like the Revigator stored a gallon of water inside a radium-laced bucket; drinking the water would cure any number of ailments, from arthritis to impotence to wrinkles.

3. In Toys And Nightlights

The Radiumscope, a toy sold as late as 1942, offered a glimpse of radium in action. Noting radium’s famed luminescence, the ad also mentions that the radiumscope could double as a “wonderful” nightlight, since it “glows with a weird light in a dark room.”

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A Massachusetts prosecutor has resigned in the wake of a scandal that threatens to unravel thousands of drug cases in the state, Ally Donnelly of NECN reports.

Chemist Annie Dookhan, 34, was arrested last month after she admitted to tampering with evidence over two or three years, the AP reported at the time.

George Papachristos, 37, prosecuted numerous drug cases in which Dookhan provided the drug analysis, according to the Boston Globe.

The Globe, citing an unnamed person familiar with the investigation, reports that Papachristos and Dookhan frequently exchanged emails and that some touched on personal subjects like Dookhan’s troubled marriage.

District Attorney Michael Morrissey released the following statement:

“After discussions with his supervisors, Assistant District Attorney George Papachristos has offered his resignation ... George Papachristos communicated that he does not wish to be a further distraction from the central issue of the criminal conduct that has been alleged and the complete breakdown of supervision that allowed it to continue.”

Dookhan handled more than 60,000 drug samples submitted in the cases of about 34,000 defendants over nine years, according to the AP. 

The office of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick identified 1,141 inmates in Massachusetts jails and prisons convicted based on evidence handled by Dookhan, the Globe has previously reported.

The Globe notes that some drug convicts have already been released from custody because of questions about the handling of evidence in their cases. The ACLU is asking that all cases be thrown out where DAs or police officers communicated directly with the chemist, according to NECN.

 Here's the NECN report:

SEE ALSO: Rogue Chemist Arrested After Admitting She Faked Drug Tests >

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If researchers from Rice University and MIT have their way, the super soldier of the future will be outfitted in razor-thin armor that's impervious to bullets. The team of mechanical engineers and materials scientists have developed a special ballistics material that's just 20 nanometers thick (a water molecule is just one-nanometer wide) and can stop a deadly projectile in its tracks. 

The material, a structured polymer composite made of alternating rubbery and glassy layers, can absorb the kinetic energy from high impact assaults with startling efficiency. During tests, researchers blasted it with tiny glass beads that simulated the impact from a 9-millimeter bullet. The ultra-thin layers didn't just halt a projectile in its path, but sealed up around the embedded bead. 

Why is it so effective? When the composite is hit, it quickly melts into a liquid before instantaneously hardening to close up the resulting damage. That means there's no structural deformities to deal with. "There's no macroscopic damage; the material hasn't failed; it hasn't cracked," says Ned Thomas, a researcher who worked on the project. "This would be a great ballistic windshield material." 

In addition to yielding better body armor for soldiers and police, the composite could potentially provide more resilient outer layers for spacecraft to ward off meteorite fragments and other space debris, andmore durable jet-turbine blades.

Take a look:

Sources: ABC News, Rice University, ZeeNews

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After Thanksgiving dinner, many people start to feel a little drowsy.

Turkey typically gets the blame.

It supposedly contains high levels of tryptophan, an amino acid that is sold in a purified form to help people fall asleep.

But turkey contains about the same amount of tryptophan as chicken, beef and other meats.

If Thanksgiving drowsiness is not about the main course, what is responsible?

It may have more to do with the side dishes.

To understand, we first need to digest a little food chemistry.

To start, we get tryptophan and other essential amino acids from all the protein in our diet, not just from meat. These amino acids swim through the bloodstream, nourishing our cells.

Brain cells convert tryptophan into a chemical called serotonin. This neurotransmitter helps regulate sleep and appetite and high levels of serotonin are associated with calm and relaxation.

But tryptophan and other amino acids can’t access brain cells on their own — instead, teams of proteins transport amino acids across the blood-brain barrier.

As it turns out, Thanksgiving side dishes probably make it easier for tryptophan to get inside the brain.

Mashed potatoes, stuffing and bread — as well as dessert — contain a lot of carbohydrates, which stimulate release of the hormone insulin.

Insulin encourages our muscles to absorb certain amino acids from the blood — but not tryptophan. So eating all those carb-heavy side dishes increases the amount of tryptophan in the blood relative to other amino acids, which means more tryptophan gets into the brain.

This eventually translates to higher serotonin levels, which probably contribute to Thanksgiving stupor.

However, this complex chain of chemical reactions is not the only reason people feel sleepy on Turkey Day

Studies have confirmed big meals of any kind make people drowsy. It takes a lot of energy to digest all that food. Also, during festive meals, many people enjoy a little beer or wine, making slumber all the more appealing.

And on top of it all, preparing such a large meal is physically exhausting, not to mention all the arguing — I mean, socializing — with extended family.

For Scientific American’s Instant Egghead, I’m Ferris Jabr.

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This post originally appeared on Futurity.org and is available through a Creative Commons license.

In the most comprehensive study to date on how storage temperature affects wines with different packaging systems, researchers found that bag-in-box wine is more vulnerable to warmer storage temperatures than bottled wine.

Their findings are reported online in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

“Earlier research has compared bottled wine with bagged wine or bottled wines capped with different closures, but this is the first comparison of all of the different packaging configurations under different storage temperatures,” says lead researcher Helene Hopfer, a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Viticulture and Enology at the University of California, Davis.

“In addition, this was the most comprehensive wine packaging and storage study, examining the effects of temperature on aroma, taste, mouthfeel, and color, and correlating those changes with measurements of chemical and physical changes,” says Hopfer, who collaborated on the study with enology professors Susan Ebeler and Hildegarde Heymann.

The researchers used chemical analyses and a panel of trained tasters to analyze how storage at three different temperatures affected California chardonnay in five different packaging configurations: glass bottles with either natural corks, synthetic corks, or screw caps, and two kinds of bag-in-box containers.

The wine was made from grapes grown in Monterey County and fermented in stainless steel tanks, rather than oak barrels.

Warmer storage temperatures produced the most significant changes in the wine, and those changes were more pronounced in the bag-in-box wine than any of the bottled wine. Bagged wine stored at 68 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit aged significantly faster than did the bottled wine, becoming darker and developing sherry-like, dried fruit-like, and vinegar-like attributes.

Many of the observations made by members of the sensory panel who tasted the wine were confirmed by chemical analysis. All of the wines analyzed aged better when they were stored at 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

“The way a wine looks, tastes, and smells is affected by the way certain wine compounds react with oxygen,” Hopfer says. “Those reactions speed up at higher temperatures, so differences in the way packaging systems manage oxygen in the container become critically important to aging and stability of the wine.”

The researchers have conducted a very similar study using the same packaging configuration and storage temperatures with cabernet sauvignon wine. A paper reporting the results from that study has been submitted for journal publication.

Constellation Brands and ACI CORK USA provided wine samples and packaging materials.

Source: UC Davis

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Chemicals in your body can influence how generous or selfish you are, and, in recent years, experiments have explored the role of one called oxytocin — which one researcher calls the "moral molecule."

In an experiment known as the ultimatum game, one of two people is given a sum of money, say $100, and told he must decide how to split it with person No. 2.

If person No. 2 is dissatisfied with the split, then she can reject it, but then the money vanishes, and neither person gets any.

Neuroeconomist Paul Zak and colleagues have performed many variations on this experiment. In one, they gave some participants a squirt of oxytocin to the nose beforehand, and found that the share of money they offered the other side increased by 80 percent.

(It's important to note that the increase occurred when person No. 1 had to consider person No. 2's reaction to the offer.)

Zak's work indicates oxytocin — once best known as a hormone released during birth and breast-feeding— also plays a fundamental role in promoting social behavior, he told an audience at the New York Academy of Sciences on Tuesday (Dec. 11).

Oxytocin also acts as a neurotransmitter, or messenger between brain cells. [11 Interesting Effects of Oxytocin]

His presentation was one of a series on the science behind the seven deadly sins, in this case, greed.

"The seven deadly sins are still deadly, because they separate us from other people," Zak said. "They are all about putting 'me' first and that is maladaptive for social creatures like us."

Oxytocin, in particular, promotes empathy, and when the chemical is inhibited in someone, they become more prone to sinful, or selfish, behavior, he said. 

But this system doesn't work for everyone.

Zak illustrated this using the example of a young Canadian woman, Stephanie Castagnier, who was a contestant on real-estate mogul Donald Trump's reality TV show"The Apprentice." Castagnier presented herself as "the goddess of greed," he writes in his book, "The Moral Molecule" (Dutton Adult, 2012).

Zak showed Castagnier a video depicting a 2-year-old boy who is dying of cancer. Not surprisingly, this video typically prompted a strong reaction. Zak found it prompted oxytocin levels to increase by an average of 47 percent in the blood of viewers. However, Castagnier's oxytocin increased only 9 percent. 

"She doesn't have the physiology of empathy," Zak told the audience, adding that this allowed her to be more aggressive.

The hormone testosterone inhibits oxytocin, but Zak found that, while Castagnier had unusually low levels of testosterone, she had incredibly high levels of dihydrotestosterone, or DHT, a "high octane" version of testosterone, he said. The DHT was blocking the oxytocin, he concluded.

Zak and colleagues found that men given testosterone became 27 percent less generous toward others when playing the ultimatum game.

But in spite of this anti-social influence, testosterone does help maintain social order. In fact, people with high levels of testosterone are prone to want to punish those seen as uncooperative and greedy, even spending their own resources to do so, Zak has found. 

Castagnier's personal history also offered a clue. Oxytocin is released as part of what Zak calls the "human oxytocin mediated empathy" circuit. Research on women who endured repeated sexual abuse as children indicates this circuit does not function properly for them, said Zak.

The abuse they experienced seems to prevent this circuit from developing properly, he said.

In Castagnier's case, her father, who was a high-rolling drug dealer, became a homeless junkie when she was young. Before she had finished high school, both of her parents had died of AIDS, Zak writes in his book.

Based on his observations during a three-on-three paintball game, Zak surmised her greed was focused on money; she was capable of behaving cooperatively in other situations.

Other research is also exploring the complex effects of this chemical messenger, oxytocin, which has also been dubbed a "love drug."

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A woman's relationship satisfaction changes as she nears ovulation, when she's most fertile.

But whether or not she's more or less happy with her guy depends on his sex appeal.

In a new study, heterosexual women who rated their guys as highly sexually desirable felt closer to their partners and more satisfied with their relationships just before ovulation, as compared to their less-fertile days.

The opposite was true for women who said their partners were less sexy; they felt less close to their male partners and were more critical of their mate's faults as they approached ovulation.

Previous research has shown that the type of man a woman prefers tends to change across her ovulatory cycle, as she becomes more attracted to masculine faces and bodies, and bilateral symmetry, when she's fertile.

Another recent study showed that heterosexual women actually look and sound more attractive to guys on the women's fertile compared with non-fertile days.

"This is the first research to show that these changes have implications for relationship functioning," said study researcher Christina Larson, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Hormones likely influence these fluctuating preferences and evaluations. However, the researchers didn't directly measure hormones.

"So we can't say exactly which hormones were responsible or how exactly they change women's behaviors," Larson said. Estrogen, which peaks at ovulation, is a strong candidate, she said.

Sexiness and satisfaction

The study, detailed online Dec. 3 in the journal Hormones and Behavior, involved 108 heterosexual women who had not used birth control in the past three months and who were not pregnant or breast-feeding.

The women, who had been in committed relationships for an average of two years, answered the same questions during two sessions, one during their high-fertility phase and one during their low-fertility phase.

The subjects self-reported where they were in their cycles, and the researchers confirmed the high-fertility session with an ovulation test. [10 Odd Facts About a Woman's Body]

The questionnaires included prompts such as, "How desirable do you think women find your partner as a short-term mate or casual sex partner, compared to most men?" and, "How sexy would women say your partner is, compared to most men?"

The women also answered questions about their closeness to their partners, their partners' faults and virtues, and the women's commitment to and satisfaction with their relationships.

The good news for men: Although a woman's time of the month seemed to influence her feelings about her partner and relationship satisfaction, her commitment to the relationship stayed constant throughout the cycle.

The findings are in line with the so-called dual-mating hypothesis, which suggests that women have two mate-choice mechanisms: "one leading to preferences for sexually desirable men who have high-fitness genes, and one leading to preferences for men who are able to invest in a woman and her children," the authors wrote in the journal article.

Choosing mates

Though the researchers can't say that hormones caused the mate-preference changes, there's reason to think the two might be related from an evolutionary perspective.

Dissatisfaction with a less sexually desirable partner when a woman is near ovulation may have encouraged cheating among our female ancestors, thus increasing the likelihood of conceiving children with sexually desirable partners, Larson told LiveScience.

Because sexually desirable traits like masculine appearance in men are thought to have indicated genetic quality in ancestral environments, these couplings outside the primary partnership might have provided an evolutionary advantage for ancestral women.

"All else being equal, a woman who conceived children with men who possessed high fitness genes (e.g., relatively free of deleterious genetic mutations) probably had children who were more likely to survive and later reproduce than the children of a woman who chose a less genetically fit partner," the authors wrote.

Sexually desirable men would have benefited, as well, but "if men were sexually undesirable, these behaviors were likely to be reproductively disadvantageous if they caused their partners to conceive children with other men," Larson said.

Jealousy and mate guarding — actions that men perform more frequently when their partners are fertile, according to research — may have coevolved to counter cheating. Larson’s lab previously showed that men identified as not very sexy were more jealous and attentive to their mates on the women's high-fertility days.

In the future, Larson plans to study whether or not women actually change their behavior — treating less desirable partners differently than sexier guys, or even cheating on them — when fertile.

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This article was originally published on Futurity and has been re-printed here under the Creative Commons license.

At the origin of life, the first protocells must have needed a vast amount of energy to drive their metabolism and replication, as enzymes that catalyze very specific reactions were yet to evolve.

So where did all that energy come from on the early Earth, and how did it get focused into driving the organic chemistry required for life?

Nick Lane at the University College London and Bill Martin at the University of Dusseldorf address those questions—and why all life as we know it conserves energy in the peculiar form of ion gradients across membranes—in their research published in the journal Cell.

“Life is, in effect, a side-reaction of an energy-harnessing reaction. Living organisms require vast amounts of energy to go on living,” says Lane. “It is possible to trace a coherent pathway leading from no more than rocks, water, and carbon dioxide to the strange bioenergetic properties of all cells living today.”

Humans consume more than a kilogram (more than 700 liters) of oxygen every day, exhaling it as carbon dioxide. The simplest cells, growing from the reaction of hydrogen with carbon dioxide, produce about 40 times by mass as much waste product from their respiration as organic carbon.

In all these cases, the energy derived from respiration is stored in the form of ion gradients over membranes.

This strange trait is as universal to life as the genetic code itself.

Lane and Martin show that bacteria capable of growing on no more than hydrogen and carbon dioxide are remarkably similar in the details of their carbon and energy metabolism to the far-from-equilibrium chemistry occurring in a particular type of deep-sea hydrothermal vent, known as alkaline hydrothermal vents.

Based on measured values, they calculate that natural proton gradients, acting across thin semi-conducting iron-sulphur mineral walls, could have driven the assimilation of organic carbon, giving rise to protocells within the microporous labyrinth of these vents.

They go on to demonstrate that such protocells are limited by their own permeability, which ultimately forced them to transduce natural proton gradients into biochemical sodium gradients, at no net energetic cost, using a simple Na+/H+ transporter.

Their hypothesis predicts a core set of proteins required for early energy conservation, and explains the puzzling promiscuity of respiratory proteins for both protons and sodium ions.

These considerations could also explain the deep divergence between bacteria and archaea, single celled microorganisms.

Source: University College London

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Concrete is great stuff, but when it gets damaged it can be annoying and dangerous. When used to make roads and bridges it can also be hell on your car's suspension, tires, and gas mileage.   

Concrete damage happens gradually, and can often be blamed on something called "microcracking." Over time, tiny cracks form in concrete that allow water and pollutants to seep in and corrode it. What starts off as a small, barely visible problem can eventually deteriorate into a severe safety hazard.  

But Korean chemist Chanmoon Chung, a chemist at Yonsei University, was part of a team that has invented a sprayable protective coating that can heal cracks in concrete as they form. It could save billions of dollars a year in the U.S. alone.    

How it works is simple. The liquid contains countless tiny microcapsules filled with a healing solution. When there is damage to a surface — say, by car or truck tires — the capsules burst and fill the tiny cracks the tires create so they don't propagate.

There are some similar self-healing concretes and protective coatings already, but they need chemical catalysts to activate the healing solution. Chung's solution can harden using just sunlight.  

We asked him about the new product:

Business Insider: So what are microcracks and why are they a problem?

Chanmoon Chung: When cracks form and propagate in concrete, water, chloride ions, and carbon dioxide penetrate through the cracks. This results in the deterioration of concrete, leading to a reduction in its serviceability. 

BI: Can you tell me how your solution is different from the others currently available?

CC: A typical extrinsic self-healing system employs a microencapsulated healing agent and a (microencapsulated) catalyst. When microcracks propagate through the matrix, the healing agent is released from ruptured microcapsules and polymerizes on contact with the catalyst to repair the damaged region.

However, there are limitations of this system, including catalyst availability, cost, environmental toxicity, stability, and materials processing. Recently catalyst-free, self-healing systems have been studied to develop less expensive and more practical ways to self-repair polymeric materials. One autonomous, catalyst-free approach is self-healing under natural conditions, for example, in the presence of sunlight.

BI:  About how long does it take to heal, once the capsules have been ruptured?

CC: In this paper self-healing was achieved by exposure to sunlight with relatively low intensity for 4 hours (the experiment was performed in November).

BI: Some of the news reports have said this polymer could save governments a lot of money in road repair.  What are some of the other applications on which this coating could be used? 

CC: Basically our self-healing coating system can be used anywhere concrete structures are present. We think that our system is especially suitable for concrete structures that are difficult [to] access (for example, a bridge over the sea). It can be difficult to inspect such concrete structures, so microcracks may cause big safety problems without recognition.

BI: What about something like an outdoor concrete water tank or a pool? Could the polymer work if it were at the bottom of a swimming pool filled with water?

CC: We think the coating might work to some extent in the water. In the case that the coating can’t be exposed to sunlight in the water, just recoating by the healing agent in the crack region may occur.

BI: Could this work in places that have little sun during certain times of the year, like Alaska or Iceland?

CC: I think that the self healing coating could work under the conditions of little sun and intense cold because the healing agent has relatively high flowability and photoreactivity even under low temperatures.

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It may seem incredible that a substance can be both nourishing and lethal.

But that's the case in the explosion at the fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas, which witnesses likened to a nuclear blast.

The substance that killed up to 15 people, injured 180 and wrecked the buildings in a five-block radius is the same stuff that makes the beans and barley grow.

But not all fertilizers are equally dangerous. And the West plant may have been harboring the worst of them all.

Barring any criminal involvement, in which case all bets are off, the two most likely culprits in the blast are anhydrous ammonia and ammonium nitrate. Both are inorganic fertilizers that were being stored in "substantial amounts" at the West Chemical and Fertilizer Company building, the New York Times reports.

Anhydrous ammonia is a gas that can cause severe burns when it comes in contact with human skin, Richard Ferguson, professor of soil science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln told TechNewsDaily. But it won't burst into flames. 

"You need to use safety gloves and goggles around [anhydrous ammonia], but it’s not explosive," said Ferguson. "It's not very flammable at all … If an [anhydrous ammonia] tank ruptures, the tank is going to decompress explosively, but that’s not chemical, that’s physical." Think of a balloon bursting rather than erupting in a fireball.

Ammonium nitrate is another story. This fertilizer is a gravel-like solid, making it far easier to handle and transport. But when mixed with a fuel and ignited, it becomes a powerful explosive.

Ammonium nitrate was the primary explosive used in the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995.  Bomber Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols purchased  forty 50-pound bags of the fertilizer from a supply company in Kansas, according to their testimony. The ammonium nitrate, mixed with a fuel called nitromethane  and an explosive used by commercial mining companies called Tovex, was enough to level the  Alfred P. Murrah Federal building, damage 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius and kill 168 people, according to the Oklahoma City Police Department report.

At the Texas fertilizer plant, something else served as a fuel: firefighters responded to a fire on the premises at around 7:30. The explosion occurred at 7:50

"In many parts of the country, ammonium nitrate has largely disappeared from the market because of the concern for its safety," Ferguson told TechNewsDaily.

In a now-infamous report filed before the accident, Texas regulators claimed that the plant’s "worst-case scenario" would be a 10-minute release of gas that would injure no one. That sounds like anhydrous ammonia. If it were to escape into the atmosphere, it would dissipate so rapidly that it wouldn’t be able to cause anything more than skin irritation and a bad smell, said Ferguson.

Ferguson was hesitant to speculate, but did say that ammonium nitrate appears to be the more likely candidate for the force behind the West, Texas, explosion., even though the plant primarily stored anhydrous ammonia.

"I’m not aware of any state where ammonium nitrate is predominant source [of inorganic fertilizer] where 30, 40 years ago it might have been," Ferguson told TechNewsDaily. “And that’s related primarily to security concerns.”

So why is ammonium nitrate still in use? It's cheap and effective.

You could be forgiven if you associate fertilizer with manure — organic waste is the oldest and most natural way to boost soil nutrient content.  And it’s very hard to make poop explode.

But manure alone doesn’t cut it. "'There just aren’t enough organic sources of fertilizer [i.e. manure] to raise the crops that we raise today," said Ferguson. "The foods that we eat are all primarily reliant on inorganic fertilizers ... Our society today would not be where it is without inorganic fertilizer."

One of the more popular synthetic options is urea, an ammonium-based compound that is safer to transport, handle and disperse than anhydrous ammonia and ammonium nitrate. But it is a bit more complicated to manufacture, and also works less efficiently than ammonium nitrate, because when it hits the soil, the resulting reaction lets a lot of nitrogen escape into the atmosphere.

This "volatile loss," as it’s called, is amplified in soils with a low acidity. And as a general rule, soil in the western part of the U.S. tends to be more alkaline (the opposite of acidic), meaning urea is a less effective fertilizer in parts of Texas.

Another option is ammonium sulfate. This is the substance primarily used at the American Plant Food Corporation, a producer and marketer of fertilizer based in Houston. Ammonium sulfate is well-suited to alkaline soils, and is less flammable, but it offers fewer nutrients for its weight than ammonium nitrate.

The West, Texas, disaster will, if anything, only accelerate the declining usage of ammonium nitrate as a fertilizer, Ferguson said. But because of its low price, effectiveness and relative ease of transport, ammonium nitrate will probably still be in use — and still pose a danger — for some time.

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