The 2104 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, STED Microscopy, and the Donut of Darkness

This month I was a bit puzzled when comparing how journalists described this year’s winners of the Nobel prizes for physics and chemistry. They had an easy time with physics. For example CNET said Efficient, useful blue-light LED draws Nobel Prize in Physics. But, many fumbled on headlines for chemistry, like the Associated Press with 3 win chemistry Nobel for super-zoom microscopes, and the New York Times with Nobel Laureates Pushed Limits of Microscopes. At Wikipedia there is a jargon-laden article covering the broad topic of Super-resolution microscopy.   

The optical microscopes that won the Nobel prize were rather different from the brightfield transmitted light microscope (shown above) that you encountered in a school biology or science class. That type of microscope has a resolution of about half the wavelength of visible light. What’s different about the new ones?

First, these are fluorescence microscopes. The sample is illuminated using ultraviolet (black) light, which makes molecules glow (fluoresce) when observed.

Second, these are scanning microscopes. The sample is lit by moving a very narrow laser beam across the surface. The popular Nobel article titled How the optical microscope became a nanoscope described it as being like a nano flashlight.

One of the techniques that won the prize is Stimulated Emission Depletion (STED) microscopy, which was developed by Stefan Hell. The depletion part of the acronym describes a very clever trick, which is the third difference. The sample is scanned by two coaxial beams: an inner ultraviolet one, and an outer depletion one that prevents fluorescence and thus creates a “Donut of Darkness” as shown above. I instantly thought of donuts when I saw Figure 2 from the Nobel article on the principle of STED microscopy. Apparently that wouldn’t have occurred to those Swedish authors, since donuts aren’t as common of a breakfast food there as in America. (Sweden just got Dunkin’ Donuts shops in May 2014).

You can watch a 39-minute YouTube video from the iBiology Microscopy Course in which Stefan Hell explains Super-Resolution: Overview and Stimulated Emission Depletion (STED) Microscopy.

The image of an optical microscope came from the National Cancer Institute.

Is it time for National Face Your Ears Day?

No, that’s just a typo. Yesterday (the second Tuesday in October) was National Face Your Fears Day (which I blogged about back in 2012). For that occasion at Inc.com Sims Wyeth just had an article with 17 Inspiring Quotes to Help You Face Your Fears.

You’d need to use a mirror (or something similar, like a still pond) to face your ears, as shown above in Edward Burne-Jones’s 1875 painting The Mirror of Venus.

Where can you find out about all those obscure days & weeks? Just look in the reference section at your friendly local public library for the latest edition of Chase’s Calendar of Events, which calls itself:

 “the authoritative guide to special occurrences, holidays, anniversaries, celebrity birthdates, religious observances, sporting events, and more from around the world.”

20 annoying buzzwords or phrases that nevermore should be used in the workplace

On September 4th Accountemps issued a press release about their survey of annoying buzzwords and phrases that should be used nevermore. They interviewed over 600 human-relations managers at companies both in the U.S. and Canada.

In alphabetical order their top twenty were:

At the end of the day * #
Circle back #
Crunch time
Deep dive
Dynamic
Employee engagement
Forward-thinking
I am overwhelmed
It’s above my pay grade
It’s not my job
Let me get back to you
LOL
Leverage #
Out of pocket
Pick my brain
Synergy * #
Think (thinking) outside the box * #
Value-added * (value add) #
When am I going to get a raise?
Win-win *

Five marked with an asterisk (*) also were in their 2004 survey titled Buzzwords Gone Bad  that listed 18, and are thus extremely stale.

Six marked with a pound sign (#) also were in their 2009 survey titled What’s the Buzz, that listed 17 and are somewhat stale.

Others from 2004 that are gone and will not be missed are:

Accountability management
Alignment
Customer centric
Core competency
Generation X
Get on the same page
Incremental
Metrics
On the runway
Paradigm
Redeployed people
Solution
Take it offline

The others from 2009 that are gone and will not be missed are:

Cutting edge
Disconnect
Game changer
Interface
It is what it is
On the same page
Reach out
Socialize
Viral

Back in 2012 I blogged about Tired old phrases to use nevermore (from a longer list published almost a century ago). 

The image with a raven was modified from one on Puck magazine cover published back on November 7, 1900.

Is that information fresh, or old and moldy?

Now and then when I visit Alltop Speaking, I look at Jeff Davidson’s Interruption Management. His latest article dated October 3rd is titled A Nation of Druggies and includes a startling statement that:

“Patrick Di Justo, writing in Wired magazine observed, ‘Antidepressants are the most commonly popped pills in the country, accounting for 227 million prescriptions filled last year alone...'.”

You might assume that last year logically would refer to 2013. But, glance at the web address for Mr. Davidson’s article, and you will see a 2007/12/ date (Jeff likes to reuse his stuff). What year was Mr. Di Justo really talking about?  His article, From Benzedrine to Abilify, Chronicling America’s Love of Psychiatric Drugs, was posted at Wired.com back on September 25, 2007.

Since the U.S. population now is about 319 million, if those prescriptions were spread around evenly it would mean that roughly 71% of us had gotten one. Obviously that’s silly, so what percent of U.S. adults really are using antidepressants?

Over at National Institute of Mental Heath (NIMH) there is a post by Tom Insel from December 6, 2011 titled Director’s Blog: Antidepressants: A Complicated Picture which says that:

“As these new CDC data show, 11 percent of Americans aged 12 and older (3.7 percent of youth between 12 and 17) report taking antidepressants. Last year, antidepressants were the second most commonly prescribed medications, right after drugs to lower cholesterol. About 254 million prescriptions were written for them, resulting in nearly $10 billion in costs.”

That is useful information, rather than just something to startle us. The image of moldy bread came from here.

Public speaking fear for adolescents in Japanese high schools

This year the results of a very large survey about fear of public speaking was published in Asia-Pacific Psychiatry magazine. That article by T. A. Furukawa et al was titled Public speaking fears and their correlates among 17,615 Japanese adolescents and appeared in Volume 6 on pages 99 to 104. In 2008 and 2009 they surveyed a sample of adolescents both in junior (grades 7 to 9, ages 12 to 15) and senior (grades 10 to 12, ages 15 to 18) high schools. Students were in both in Kochi Prefecture and Mie Prefecture (in its capital, Tsu City). You can read the abstract here at PubMed, or download a pdf of the full text here.

Students were asked:

“Have you had trembling hands, quavering voice or lost voice due to tension and anxiety when speaking in front of other people in the past month?”

They could answer No, Probably No, Probably Yes, or Yes. Only the last Yes answers were taken as a positive result.

An overall average of 7.3% reported public speaking fear. Detailed results from their Table 1 are shown above by age in a bar chart. The percentages ranged from 5.7% to 9.1%, and tended to decrease with increasing age.

Results for both females and males by age are shown above in another bar chart. At all ages females reported higher percentages that feared public speaking than males did. 

These percentages are similar to the 6.8% of Swedish adolescents in junior high school that reported a marked fear of speaking in front of the class.

These percentages are much lower than those reported for American adolescents in the NCS-A by Green et al ( 35.8% for Performing for an audience, and 24.9% for Speaking in class), but are not really comparable since the NCS-A asked for lifetime prevalence (Have you ever?) rather than monthly prevalence. 

The wrong address

On September 26th in her speech at the Value Voters Summit Sarah Palin warned that:

“Ignorance and deception, they are the enemies of democracy.”

A few minutes earlier she had criticized the president by claiming:

“Don’t retreat. You reload with truth, which I know is an endangered species at 1400 Pennsylvania Avenue, anyway truth.”

The White House is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW. 1400 is two blocks to the east, where the Willard Intercontinental Hotel sits. ABC News gleefully reported that
Sarah Palin’s Confused About Where The White House Is. She referred to her written notes just after that mistake. Using the wrong address didn’t help her credibility. She could instead have directly referred to the White House.

Don’t use the wrong address in your address. Look it up first.

So long Paul Revere

On Saturday Paul Revere, age 76, died of brain cancer at his home in Garden Valley, Idaho. Paul was the leader of the 1960’s rock band Paul Revere & the Raiders, who began in Caldwell as the Deadbeats. 

Today the Idaho Statesman has an article Remembering Paul Revere, Idaho’s rock revolutionary. Back when I was in high school their 23 hit records like Kicks and Good Thing were all over AM radio.