Some Interesting True Facts

A single second of video tape contains about 22 megabytes of data, the veryrough equivalent of about thirty copies of a 200 page book.


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Pollen never deteriorates. It is one of the few natural substances thatlasts indefinitely.

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President Bush and Saddam Hussein both have their shoes made by the sameItalian shoemaker!

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Prince Charles and Prince William never travel on the same airplane as aprecaution!

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Radio code Wilco (as in Roger Wilco) is short for Will Comply!

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Ralph Lauren’s original name is Ralph Lifshitz.

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Redheads require more anesthesia to ‘go under’ than other hair colors do.

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Reindeer milk has more fat than cow milk.

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Rubberbands last longer when refrigerated.

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Rudyard Kipling refused to write with anything other than black ink.

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Senegalese women spend an average of 17.5 hours a week just collectingwater.

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Smokers eat more sugar than non-smokers do.

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SONY was originally called ‘Totsuken’.

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Sweden has more telephones per capita than any country on earth.

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Technically speaking, crystal glass is actually a Liquid that flows veryslowly.

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Ted Turner owns about 2% of New Mexico.

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The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third asthick as the air at sea level.
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The are six fictional characters that have stars on Hollywood’s ‘Walk ofFame’.

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The average life span of a hermit crab is 75 years!

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The best diamonds are colored blue-white.

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The first Ford cars had Dodge engines.

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The first product to have a bar code was Wrigleys gum!

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The first programme shown on BBC2 was Play School

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The first song played on Virgin Radio was Born to be wild by INXS!

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The glue on Israeli stamps is certified kosher.

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The great warrior Ghengis Khan died in bed while having sex

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The mile is Latin for 1,000. The number of paces it took the average Roman!

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The name Joshua is Hebrew for ‘Jesus’.

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The speed of a typical raindrop is 17 miles per hour.

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The state with the longest coastline in the Continental U.S. is Michigan.

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The University of Alaska stretches over 4 time zones.

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The weight of a carat (200 milligrams), standard unit of measurement forgemstones, is based on the weight of the carob seed.

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The wingspan of a Boeing 747 is longer than the Wright brother’s firstflight.

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The word taxi is spelled the same in English, German, French, Swedish andPortuguese.

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There are approximately 3,500 astronomers in the U.S. – but over 15,000astrologers.

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Tsunamis ( tidal waves ) travel as fast as jet planes.

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Wearing yellow makes you look bigger on camera; green, smaller.

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20 Fast Facts About Cigarette Smoking

Most people who smoke first light up a cigarette when they’re teenagers. In fact, 80% of smokers began the habit before they turned 18. Here are a few quick facts about cigarette smoking, nicotine and tobacco that you may not have heard before. Even if you have, they’re facts that are worth keeping in mind when your friends and relatives light up a cigarette.

1. Nearly 70% of people who smoke say they wish they could quit.
2. Teens who smoke cough and wheeze three times more than teens who don’t smoke.
3. Smoking causes cancer, heart disease, lung disease and strokes.
4. Smokers as young as 18 years old have shown evidence of developing heart disease.
5. More than 70% of young people who smoke said they wish they hadn’t started doing it.
6. Smoking a pack of cigarettes each day costs about $1,500 per year — enough money to buy a new computer or Xbox.
7. Studies show that 43% of people who smoke three or fewer cigarettes a day become addicted to nicotine.
8. More than 434,000 Americans die each year from smoking-related diseases.
9. One-third of all new smokers will eventually die from a smoking-related disease.
10. Nicotine — one of the main ingredients in cigarettes — is a poison.
11. Nicotine is as addictive as heroin and cocaine.
12. All tobacco products — that includes cigarettes, cigars and chewing tobacco — have nicotine in them.
13. Smoking makes you feel weaker and more tired because it prevents oxygen from reaching your heart.
14. Smoking decreases your sense of taste and smell, making you enjoy things like flowers and ice cream a little bit less.
15. Smoking hurts the people around you: More than 53,000 people die each year from secondhand smoke.
16. Cigarettes have tons of harmful chemicals in them, including ammonia (found in toilet cleaner), carbon monoxide (found in car exhaust) and arsenic (found in rat poison).
17. Quitting smoking is one of the best things you can do for your health.
18. Just days after quitting smoking, a person’s sense of taste and smell returns to normal.
19. Ten years after quiting smoking, a person’s risk of lung cancer and heart disease returns to that of a non-smoker.
20. Most teens (about 70%) don’t smoke. Plus, if you make it through your teen years without becoming a smoker, chances are you’ll never become a smoker.

Adapted from “50 Things You Should Know About Tobacco” by Journeyworks Publishing.

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Different Types of Kisses

Want to discover some new ways to kiss your sweetie? Get some fun ideas from this guide to the different types of kisses. You’re guaranteed to learn a new kissing style!

1. The French Kiss

Probably the most famous kiss there is, the French kiss is an open-mouthed kiss where one person’s tongue touches the other person’s tongue. Also called a “tongue kiss,” the French kiss easy enough to execute, but it can take years to master.  

2. The Butterfly Kiss

To give someone a butterfly kiss, get close to them so the tips of your eyelashes are touching theirs. Then blink very fast so your eyelashes flutter together like butterfly wings. It’s a fun, cute thing to do while you’re catching your breath from more traditional kisses. You can also give someone a solo butterfly kiss by fluttering your eyelids against their cheek.

3. The Single-Lip Kiss

To give someone a single-lip kiss, take one of their lips between yours and gently suck or tug on it. It’s an awfully romantic kiss, and if you do it right, you’ll send tingles up and down your sweetie’s spine.

4. The Spiderman Kiss

Based on the kiss in the 2002 movie Spider-Man, the Spiderman kiss involves kissing someone whose face is upside-down from yours, so your top lip kisses their bottom lip and vice versa.

5. The Earlobe Kiss

A great kiss to to perform while you’re taking a break from lip kisses, the earlobe kiss involves taking someone’s earlobe lightly between your lips and tugging gently downward. For a more intense earlobe kiss, add a little bit of tongue, or use a gentle sucking motion on their earlobe.

6. The Lip Gloss Kiss

This is a fun, flirty kiss for girlfriends to give their boyfriends. Put on a healthy amount of lip gloss or ChapStick, then rub your lips on your partners’ lips until theirs are coated, too. For extra fun, surprise your partner with a sweet, fruity lip gloss flavor.

7. The Eskimo Kiss

In an Eskimo kiss, two people rub their noses back and forth against each other. It’s based on real kisses that people in Eskimo cultures give their friends. Just like with lip kisses, Eskimo kisses are best executed with your eyes closed.

8. The Cheek Kiss

The cheek kiss is exactly what it sounds like – a closed-mouth kiss against someone’s cheek. Cheek kisses can be used as friendly greetings, flirty thank-you’s or cute, unexpected ways to say good-bye to your boyfriend or girlfriend.

9. The Hickey

A hickey technically isn’t a kiss; it’s a red mark (a bruise, really) left on the skin after someone sucks hard enough on it. Hickeys hurt a little to get, but some people think the sucking feels good, especially on the side of the neck. It can be embarrassing to walk around with a hickey, so before you start sucking, get permission first.

10. The Secret Message Kiss

In the middle of a French kiss, spell out a secret message with the tip of your tongue against their tongue. It might feel a little funny to the other person, but at least you’ll be getting your message across.

11. The Vampire Kiss

The vampire kiss is a deep kiss on someone’s neck that can involve sucking or light biting on the skin. Since some people find it painful rather than sexy, and since the sucking might leave a hickey, always ask permission before you give someone a vampire kiss.

12. The Wet Kiss

Wet kisses are any open-mouthed kisses, with or without tongue. A little bit of wetness during a kiss can be sexy, but try not to overdo it: too much saliva is sloppy. Alternate between wet kisses and closed-mouth kisses and single-lip kisses, and be sure to swallow occasionally so you don’t accidentally drool all over your partner.

13. The Lizard Kiss

The lizard kiss involves flicking your tongue in and out of your partner’s mouth in tight, quick strokes (picture the way a lizard moves its tongue). This is a silly kiss you can try just for fun, but it generally should be avoided because it feels kind of creepy to get.

14. The Air Kiss

The air kiss is a sophisticated gesture you can use as a greeting to your friends and relatives. To give one, rest your cheek against their cheek and make a kissing sound with your lips.

15. The Biting Kiss

The biting kiss is a more aggressive form of the French kiss. Like the French kiss, it’s open-mouthed and incorporates tongue, but as you pull back, your teeth lightly grab onto your sweetie’s tongue for just a second. Try it once and see how your partner responds. Some people love it, but others think it’s painful or weird.

16. The Angel Kiss

To give someone an angel kiss, kiss them very gently on their eyelids or on the spot right next to their eye, using just your lips. It’s a very romantic way to wake someone up or say goodbye.

17. The Neck Kiss

After French kissing for a while, some people mix it up by trailing their mouth down and “Frenching” the other person’s neck. To execute a neck kiss perfectly, go light on the saliva, focus on the motion of your lips, never stay in once place for very long and never suck hard enough to leave a hickey.

18. The Jawline Kiss

To plant a jawline kiss on someone, give them a firm kiss on the bottom of their jaw, right where their face meets their neck. If they respond well to it, make a path of jawline kisses up to their ear and give them an earlobe kiss.

19. The Breath Kiss

The breath kiss is a fun, silly kiss that’s almost more of a game than a kiss. To do it, open your mouth, inhale deeply and lock lips with your sweetie (like you’re performing CPR). Slowly exhale into their mouth while they’re inhaling, “passing” the breath to them. Without moving, slowly inhale while your partner exhales. Keep passing the breath back and forth until one of you runs out of breath or you both erupt in giggles.

20. The Love Kiss

Finally, the love kiss is any kiss that you give while thinking tender, loving thoughts about your partner. You might not realize it, but your kissing style can be influenced by whatever’s on your mind. Smooching with love on your mind will make your kisses extra soft and sweet. Whether it’s on your partner’s mouth, neck, ear or forehead, the love kiss is the most romantic kiss you can give.

Related Post

10 Tips on How to Kiss

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Google revises privacy policy, responds to critics with the ‘real story’

Eliciting such overly-sensational headlines as “Google’s Broken Promise: The End of Don’t Be Evil”, a preview of Google’s new privacy policy has generated quite a stir across the web. Facing criticism from both the public and Congress (PDF), Google is now responding to those claims on its public policy blog.

The most raucous portion of the debate centers around changes which allow Google to share what it knows about you to other Google services. Google’s blog summarizes the controversial bit nicely:

The main change is for users with Google Accounts. Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.

As a minority of professional journalists and bloggers point out though, the wording may have changed, but little else has. Although people are now up in arms, Google has always been able to combine and share your personal data among its own services. Here’s an excerpt from an ancient, tattered, crinkly privacy policy dating all the way back to 2005:

We may combine the information you submit under your account with information from other Google services or third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services.

Google spins the new changes as a way to simplify privacy. Instead of 60+ different policies spanning their entire bevy of services, Google’s privacy policy will now be a single document applicable to everything in the Googleverse.

The company has also made the policy easier to understand, avoiding the blobs legalese typically found in such documents.

Defending the changes in its blog, Google points out that nowhere does the new policy empower them to collect more information about you or change the way they use it. Here’s what the company has to say:

• You still have choice and control. You don’t need to log in to use many of our services, including Search, Maps and YouTube. If you are logged in, you can still edit or turn off your Search history, switch Gmail chat to “off the record,” control the way Google tailors ads to your interests, use Incognito mode on Chrome, or use any of the other privacy tools we offer.
• We’re not collecting more data about you. Our new policy simply makes it clear that we use data to refine and improve your experience on Google — whichever products or services you use. This is something we have already been doing for a long time.
• We’re making things simpler and we’re trying to be upfront about it. Period.
• You can use as much or as little of Google as you want. For example, you can have a Google Account and choose to use Gmail, but not use Google+. Or you could keep your data separate with different accounts — for example, one for YouTube and another for Gmail.

Unfortunately, privacy ultimately ends up being the real cost for free services and products. However, for anyone concerned about their privacy on Google, make sure to check out the Google Dashboard for a quick overview of what the company knows about you. The search company even provides a plethora of privacy tools which give users greater control over their online presence.

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Age-Related Memory Loss More Common in Men

Men in their 70s and 80s may be more likely than women of the same age to develop the memory loss and cognitive problems that often herald Alzheimer’s disease, a new study has found.

In the study, which appears in the journal Neurology, Mayo Clinic researchers examined 1,450 elderly people in Minnesota every 15 months for an average of three and a half years. During that time, 7.2% of the men and 5.7% of the women developed the mental-function problems known as mild cognitive impairment (MCI), with or without any accompanying memory loss.

The findings surprised the researchers because previous studies have suggested that more women than men ultimately go on to develop Alzheimer’s and other forms of full-blown dementia. The fact that men appear to have higher rates of MCI but lower rates of dementia may hold important clues for preventing or delaying cognitive decline, the researchers suggest.

The lead author of the study, Rosebud Roberts, a professor of epidemiology at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn, says that women with MCI may progress to dementia faster than men, causing them to be undercounted during the MCI phase. But sex-related differences in physiology and brain function may also play a role.

MCI isn’t necessarily a permanent condition. Roughly one-third of the study participants who received an MCI diagnosis following a battery of tests and interviews subsequently improved to the point that they no longer met the diagnostic criteria at a later checkup.

This so-called reversion to normal, which has been seen in other studies, may indicate that in some cases the brain actually repairs some of the damage it incurs—and this may be where sex differences come into play, says Kenneth Rockwood, M.D., a professor of geriatric medicine at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Physical activity, for instance, is believed to benefit men differently than women, says Rockwood, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study but was not involved in the new research. In women, exercise appears to be more likely to prolong life, he says, while in men it’s more likely to improve brain function.

“We might be seeing the cognitive benefits of exercise in men” in the study findings, Rockwood says. “Women who exercise also get some cognitive benefit, but they appear to get a greater survival benefit.”

The findings suggest also that men may be more vulnerable than women to certain risk factors for MCI, says Rhonna Shatz, D.O., director of behavioral neurology at the Henry Ford Health System, in Detroit.

High blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, and other known—and treatable—risk factors for MCI and dementia tend to be more common in men, which may explain the higher rate of MCI, Shatz says.

“What [the study] tells us is that, particularly in men, there are probably a whole set of factors that we have to consider as particular to their gender or lifestyle, or both, that are impacting them a lot earlier,” Shatz says. “We need to take a step back and ask if we are really doing the job we need to control the things we know are modifiable.”

Although Roberts and her colleagues didn’t investigate risk factors such as high blood pressure, they did take into account other factors that have been shown to affect MCI risk, such as age, educational attainment, and marital status. (People with more education and people who were married had lower rates of MCI than the other study participants—a pattern that has been observed in previous studies.)

Incorporating these factors into the data helped the researchers rule out the possibility that sex disparities in MCI and dementia rates are due merely to the fact that women tend to live longer, and are therefore more likely than men to live long enough to develop dementia.

More research will be needed to confirm the findings, however. Although the new study was thorough and well designed, Shatz says, the definition of MCI remains open to interpretation. A particular doctor or nurse may be more likely to arrive at an MCI diagnosis than another health professional looking at the same patient, which makes it difficult to draw broad conclusions about the prevalence of the condition.

“We don’t have good standard markers of what MCI is,” Shatz says.

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Diamond Prices

One of the proofsthat I often like to cite as to the fact that diamonds are not at all aninvestment-worthy commodity, but rather a retail product, is the system bywhich they are priced.

For all diamonds,there are a few basic universal rules.  First of all, diamonds are allpriced per carat.  So, lets say a 0.50 carat diamond has aprice of $1400 per carat (that would be around a G/H SI1/SI2 atwholesale).  So that diamond’s price for the stone would be $1400 * 0.50,or $700. Secondly, diamond prices per carat increase as youjump up to higher weight categories.  Therefore, diamondprices increase exponentially with weight, since their prices increase both dueto the increased weight and due to the higher price per carat for the increasedweight category.  I stress categories, because you might mistakenlybelieve that prices per carat increase smoothly as weight is increased, butthis is not the case.  Since diamonds are a retail product driven more byemotion than reason, a 0.99ct diamond is worth only about 1% more than asimilar diamond weighing 0.98ct.  But a 1.00ct diamond is worth about 20%more than a similar 0.99ct diamond.  Why is that?  Maybe because nowyou can say it’s a “one carat diamond,” or maybe because now it’s three fulldigits.  Who knows.  But with diamonds, it’s all about feelings. This little quirk about the business is the sole reason there are so manypoorly cut diamonds out there.  You could imagine very easily that ifthere’s a 20% price jump from a 0.99ct diamond to a 1.00ct diamond, the cutterwho looses that 0.01ct trying to make a prettier stone will lose his job. Perhaps with the nicer cut it will only be worth 15% less instead of 20%, buteither way, it’s a big loss.

This kind of pricemanipulation by maintaining weight categories has been taken to an extreme bymany of the world’s largest diamond companies.  They will take roughdiamonds with diameters that really should have only been used to make a0.75ct-0.85ct diamond (with the proper cut to maximize brilliance), but insteadwill keep them over 0.96ct to sell them as 1ct diamonds to the major jewelrychains like Kay or Zales.  Even though they will have to sell thesediamonds at steep discounts compared to well cut 1ct diamonds, they are stillsold at a significant premium to well made 3/4ct diamonds.

See the charts below for a graphical representation of this price jumping phenomenon.

In terms of pricing, there are two basic categories of diamonds — those priced off of the Rapaport diamond price list and those that aren’t.

 

 

 

 

 

What is theRapaport Price List?

Accordingto Wikipedia, Martin Rapaport “began his work in diamonds as a cleaver andrough sorter in Antwerp, Belgium.He began brokering rough and polished diamonds in New York City in 1975. In 1978, he created theRapaport Prices List, which some say is not reflective of true prices. He hassince created many businesses relating to the diamond industry, eponymouslybearing his name, including an electronic trading network for traders RapNetand INDEX, and diamond-related news in print and web formats.”

The Rapaport DiamondReport price list (“Rap List”) is released weekly on Fridays, however it doesnot necessarily change every week.  It is used as a baseline for pricingfor basically all loose diamonds sold as single individual stones (as opposedto diamonds sold in parcels) generall SI3 or better in clarity and K or betterin color (although the price list does offer prices for L and lower colors andI1 and lower clarities, they are rarely used in the industry).  Rarelywill you see a diamond with an I1 clarity grade sold with a certificate. As I discussed in the Truth about Clarity article, it is no small matter that JamesAllen has decided to sell GIA certified I1 diamonds online.  There arevery few places that do this.  Intelligent companies in the industry neversell GIA certified I1 diamonds because they know they can sell them for morewithout the the certificate (and therefore without using the Rapaport diamondprice list as the baseline).  Whenever they receive an I1 clarity gradefor a diamond which they had intended to receive an SI2, we will simply throwout the certificate and pretend it didn’t exist.

If you click on theimage of a sample “Rap List,” you will see four separate grids.  Each oneis for a different size category.  The four categories shown on thissample are 0.90-0.99, 1.00-1.49, 1.50-1.99, and 2.00-2.99.  Each grid is amatrix of color against clarity.  To find the “Rap Price” for a givendiamond, you need three pieces of information: the size category, the color,and the clarity.  Prices listed are always in hundreds.  Lets say,for example, that you have a 1.55ct H color SI1 clarity diamond.  So the“Rap Price” for that diamond would be $7,600 per carat.

But finding the RapPrice for your diamond is only the beginning of pricing a diamond.  Thereal art of diamond pricing is figuring out the discount or premiumto the Rap Price.  In the vast majority of situations, diamonds trade at adiscount to the Rap Price.  It is this figure that two diamond dealerswill haggle over.  Lets stick with our 1.55 H color SI1 clarity diamondexample.  Those three qualities (color, clarity, and weight) only bringyou to the baseline.  Now things become much more subjective. Factors that might come into play in determining the discount off of the RapPrice might include: Fluoresence, Cut, Inclusion quality, Luster of the diamondmaterial, and Color Quality.  So if that diamond were an excellent cut andthe SI1 was a beautiful SI1 that was way off on the side of the diamond andbarely visible and the H color really looked like a G, and there was nofluoresence, then the diamond might trade at -20% or even -15% less than theRap Price (in diamond jargon, this would be called “20 back” or “20below”).  This is the figure that is argued over.  So while a sellermight try to sell this diamond at “15 back,” a buyer might only wish to buy itfor “20 below.”  To calculate the actual price, you need to reduce thatpercentage from the Rap Price.  So in our example, “20 below” $7,600 percarat is $7,600 * (100%-20%), or $7,600 * 0.80, which comes to$6,080.  Then you need to multiply that price by the weight to arrive atthe final per diamond price ($6080 * 1.55 = $9,424).

Now, take anotherlook at the sample “Rap Sheet” from before. Take a close look.  Noticeanything odd?  The differences between adjacent prices in each matrix arevery far from being uniform.  For example, the difference between a 1ct Gcolor VS2 clarity diamond and a 1ct H color VS2 clarity diamond is a full$1000.  But the difference between the same G VS2 and a 1 ct F VS2 is only$500!  Don’t ask my why this is.  The diamond business is rarelybuilt on rhyme or reason.  A skilled diamond dealer, though, can help younavigate these inconsistencies to find the sweet spots of value within thispricing grid.  In our case, for example, it’s clearly not worth it toupgrade from an H color VS2 clarity to a G color VS2 clarity since it costs sounreasonably much to make that upgrade.  And anyway, as I mentioned in theTruth about Color article, color upgrades are rarely worth the money.

One interestingoutcome of the entire business being based on the Rap List is that far too muchweight is given to color and clarity in determining price.  Objectivelyspeaking, and G color SI1 clarity that is an ideal cut with a pleasently laidout inclusion will be a prettier diamond than a G color VS2 clarity with anaverage cut.  If we continue with this case, lets say for a 1 ct diamond,a G SI1 that was an ideal cut (and everything else was fine), the price wouldbe approximately “25 back,” or $6100*0.75 =  $4575 per carat.  But aG VS2 with an average cut might go for “35 back,” or $7200*0.65 = $4680. By all accounts, the “25 back” SI1 is a much much prettier diamond than a “35back” VS2, yet the VS2 is still more expensive.  This is why it is socrucial to have someone helping you along the way specifically regarding how tovalue the different factors that go into pricing a diamond.  If someoneknows what they are doing, they can really find tremendous value out there.

What about diamondspriced without the Rapaport Price List?

Just about all otherdiamonds that are not certified, and therefore not sold as single diamonds, aresold according to a “parcel price.”  This is a price per carat for theweight of diamonds purchased, irrespective of the number of diamondsselected.  Since there is no list dictating baseline prices, understandingthese prices is far more nuanced and therefore requires years of experience totruly understand a parcel’s value.  In fact, at Leo Schachter, there wereno employees who were experts in all shapes and sizes.  Parcel diamondpricing is so complex and demanding of experience, that the company was brokenup by size and shape to allow managers to become experts in their limitedfield.  There was a manager for princess and emerald cuts, round cuts0.90ct and above, round cuts below 0.90ct, and other fancy shapes.

This is not sorelevant for most of you, since you are better off buying a certifieddiamond unless you have someone you can trust completely who can sell you anuncertified diamond.

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Measuring what makes a medicine

Researchers’ method to rank molecules may aid in search for new drugs.

By Rachel Ehrenberg

COLOR ME DRUGLIKEIn charting the “drug-likeness” of related compounds (represented as dots), a few tight clusters (left) indicate chemical similarity. Smaller, dispersed bunches and free-floating dots (right, for a different type of compound) indicate a lot of chemical variation. The redder the dots, the closer the compounds are to a QED value of 1, meaning they are the most druglike. G.R. Bickerton et al/Nature Chemistry 2012

A new method for rating the attractiveness of a compound could help chemists discern potential new drugs from duds. Researchers have come up with a way to quantify a compound’s drug potential that moves beyond simply “hot or not,” instead providing a measure that allows compounds to be ranked as well.

The approach “takes things a step further, looking at multiple factors instead of yes/no,” says chemical informaticist David Wild, of the Indiana University Bloomington,  who was not involved with the research.

The new technique uses eight molecular properties — such as the number of rotatable bonds a molecule has — that influence things like a compound’s toxic effects or its likelihood of being absorbed in the body. With some clever math, those probabilities are turned into a number between zero and one. When researchers tested their method against existing techniques for screening compounds, it outperformed the standard approaches at distinguishing known drugs from other molecules, the team reports in the February issue of Nature Chemistry.  

And because the new method, called QED, or quantitative estimate of drug-likeness, provides a numerical rating, it allows chemists to prioritize molecules for drug development, says study leader Andrew Hopkins, an expert in drug discovery and molecular design at the University of Dundee in Scotland.

Existing screening techniques are often used to make pass/fail judgments on compounds’ drug potential. Lipinski’s famous Rule of Five, for example, which uses measures such as a molecular mass not greater than 500 daltons to evaluate whether a compound might be absorbed and used by the body, has become a way to filter whole libraries of compounds even though it was just meant as a guideline, Hopkins says. This means potential drugs might be routinely screened out before they’re even given a chance.

Some chemists actually aim to break the rules, with the hope of finding a drug no one has bothered to look at, a sound approach given that 16 percent of today’s oral medicines —including some well-known drugs — violate at least one of Lipinski’s rules.

“Our metric suggests you can break some rules,” says Hopkins. “As with people, you can tolerate some bad behavior in someone’s personality if they are very good in their other qualities.”

In addition to assessing 771 oral drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration, the researchers used QED to evaluate molecular properties of drug targets, the binding sites in the body that drugs latch onto. Since QED evaluates compounds on a continuum, it can reveal whether some targets’ chemical traits make them harder to get to than others, potentially highlighting the need for an innovative attack method.

QED also compared favorably with the gestalt assessment of chemists. Hopkins and his colleagues compared their technique’s evaluation of molecules with the opinions of 79 chemists who were asked whether they would pursue a potential compound. The QED values for both attractive and unattractive compounds were in line with the chemists’ ratings, suggesting the method nicely eyeballs a compound’s potential drug-worthiness.

“Chemists do have a concept of good, bad and ugly compounds,” says Hopkins.

The number of potential compounds and targets is far too large, however, for chemists to consider one-by-one. Perhaps QED can lend a hand, Wild says. “Chemists never like being told what to do by a computer, but at least the computer can help them test ideas.”

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Heart of Silk

Scientists Use Silk from the Tasar Silkworm as a Scaffold for Heart Tissue

Damaged human heart muscle cannot be regenerated. Scar tissue grows in place of the damaged muscle cells. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim are seeking to restore complete cardiac function with the help of artificial cardiac tissue. They have succeeded in loading cardiac muscle cells onto a three-dimensional scaffold, created using the silk produced by a tropical silkworm.

Of all the body’s organs, the human heart is probably the one most primed for performance and efficiency. Decade after decade, it continues to pump blood around our bodies. However, this performance optimisation comes at a high price: over the course of evolution, almost all of the body’s own regeneration mechanisms in the heart have become deactivated. As a result, a heart attack is a very serious event for patients; dead cardiac cells are irretrievably lost. The consequence of this is a permanent deterioration in the heart’s pumping power and in the patient’s quality of life.

In their attempt to develop a treatment for the repair of cardiac tissue, scientists are pursuing the aim of growing replacement tissue in the laboratory, which could then be used to produce replacement patches for the repair of damaged cardiac muscle. The reconstruction of a three-dimensional structure poses a challenge here. Experiments have already been carried out with many different materials that could provide a scaffold substance for the loading of cardiac muscle cells.

“Whether natural or artificial in origin, all of the tested fibres had serious disadvantages,” says Felix Engel, Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim. “They were either too brittle, were attacked by the immune system or did not enable the heart muscle cells to adhere correctly to the fibres.” However, the scientists have now found a possible solution in Kharagpur, India.

At the university there, coin-sized disks are being produced from the cocoon of the tasar silkworm (Antheraea mylitta). According to Chinmoy Patra, an Indian scientist who now works in Engel’s laboratory, the fibre produced by the tasar silkworm displays several advantages over the other substances tested. “The surface has protein structures that facilitate the adhesion of heart muscle cells. It’s also coarser than other silk fibres.” This is the reason why the muscle cells grow well on it and can form a three-dimensional tissue structure. “The communication between the cells was intact and they beat synchronously over a period of 20 days, just like real heart muscle,” says Engel.

Despite these promising results, clinical application of the fibre is not currently on the agenda. “Unlike in our study, which we carried out using rat cells, the problem of obtaining sufficient human cardiac cells as starting material has not yet been solved,” says Engel. It is thought that the patient’s own stem cells could be used as starting material to avoid triggering an immune reaction. However, exactly how the conversion of the stem cells into cardiac muscle cells works remains a mystery.

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Pork, the surprise remedy for a nosebleed

Researchers document the use of pork strips for treating nosebleeds

Stop those troublesome nosebleeds with strips of cured pork! Photograph: St John’s Ambulance

A new medical study recommends a method called “nasal packing with strips of cured pork” as an effective way to treat uncontrollable nosebleeds.

Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, at Detroit Medical Centre in Michigan, treated a girl who had a rare hereditary disorder that brings prolongued bleeding. Publishing in the Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology, they pack the essential details into two sentences:

“Cured salted pork crafted as a nasal tampon and packed within the nasal vaults successfully stopped nasal hemorrhage promptly, effectively, and without sequelae … To our knowledge, this represents the first description of nasal packing with strips of cured pork for treatment of life-threatening hemorrhage in a patient with Glanzmann thrombasthenia.”

They acknowledge a long tradition of using pork to treat general epistaxis, ie nosebleed. The technique fell into disuse, they speculate, because “packing with salt pork was fraught with bacterial and parasitic complications. As newer synthetic hemostatic agents and surgical techniques evolved, the use of packing with salt pork diminished.”

In 1976, Dr Jan Weisberg of Great Lakes, Illinois wrote a letter to the journal Archives of Otolaryngology, bragging that he, together with a Dr Strother and a Dr Newton, had been “privileged” to treat a man “for epistaxis secondary to Rendu-Osler-Weber disease“, an inherited problem in which blood vessels develop abnormally.

In 1953, Dr Henry Beinfield in Brooklyn, New York, published a treatise called General Principles in Treatment of Nasal Haemorrhage. Beinfield explains: “Salt pork placed in the nose and allowed to remain there for about five days has been used, but the method is rather old-fashioned.”

In 1940, Dr AJ Cone of the Washington University School of Medicine, in St Louis, praised the method in a paper called Use of Salt Pork in Cases of Haemorrhage. In Dr Cone’s experience, “it has not been uncommon in the St Louis Children’s Hospital service to have a child request that salt pork be inserted in his nose with the first sign of a nosebleed … Wedges of salt pork have saved a great deal of time and energy when used in controlling nasal haemorrhage, as seen in cases of leukemia, haemophilia … hypertension … measles or typhoid fever and during the third stage of labour”.

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Six tips for communicating research

1. Don’t be a scientist
Methodology and data need to be sound but they don’t need to be discussed – especially not with senior decision-makers.

2. Edit furiously
When you’ve done loads of work, have masses of data and taken the client’s money, the temptation is to show as much as you can to justify the fee. But 160-slide PowerPoint decks bury messages. Do 30 instead – and keep the rest for reference.

3. Put the debrief in a context
Learn as much as possible about the client and their situation. And work hard to define the brief as much as possible. Use that information to interpret your insights.

4. Be assertive
With the right context you ought to be able to make recommendations, not just deliver results. Your efforts might be knocked back, but rarely will they not be appreciated.

5. Tailor your messages
There’s a world of difference between a debrief for a research team and for their CEO. And even then, no two research teams have the same priorities.

6. Rehearse, tweak, rehearse
Bold, attention-grabbing presentations of direct assertions can be risky if they’re not slick, confident and accurate. Pare down the detail, then get the pitch just right.

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