My future job

Mr. Neil Doncaster,

Chief Executive,

Norwich City Football Club,

Carrow Road

Norwich NR2 3EW

Dear Neil,

After the debacles against Hull and Spurs, whereby in both games the lads managed to reduce themselves within 5 minutes to lurching after the shadows of the opposition like blinded zombies, it’s clear that Carrow Road needs some big changes.

So I am hereby applying for the obviously-soon-to-be-vacant position of manager of Norwich City FC.

You’ll probably want to know what experience I have in running a football club? The answer is: none whatsoever!

So what? I’ll run the show using a three-point principle broadly inspired by the athletics department of my current employer.

Firstly, I’ll get rid of the best players. This will engender an unprecedented level of solidarity in the remainder, leading to their being psychologically solidly impenetrable.

Anyway it’ll be quite easy to do because my predecessor Hughton has already voided the club of all but a couple of the good players – there’s only Hoolahan and the lad Redmond left. They’ll have to go!

Secondly, in a revolutionary step, I’ll remove the goalkeeper from the team! Knowing that our goal is gaping and unprotected will give our outfield players tremendous incentive to never let the opposition have the ball.

Thirdly, I’ll stop all training sessions. This will make the players so keen to play so that, come Saturday afternoon they’ll all run around like demented threshing machines, reducing even our dear friends from Ipswich to a bunch of whimpering blue babies.

It’s time the Canaries opened up a can of Norfolk Whoop Ass on the Premier League.

On the Ball City!

Let’s get to work!

Yours,  Jeremy C. Smith. 

TV Link to our nerve agent prophylaxis development work

http://www.wate.com/story/23457797/ornl-researchers-work-to-protect-people-from-deadly-chemical-gases

The Solution to Syria

Amidst the confused public debate as to what to do about chemical weapons and what is happening in Syria, there seems to be no clear consensus as to how best to deter their use.  But the fact is that there was a solution to this problem that, with a bit of thought and development, could have been implemented by now. And it does not involve arming Al Quaeda,  potentially ineffective or counterproductive military strikes or, indeed,  any military strikes at all, and it would not have needed any international agreement.

The solution, which is still the way to go, is to render  chemical weapons ineffective.

Enzymes exist that can act as "bioscavangers", chemically transforming nerve gases such as sarin and VX into harmless molecules by breaking them apart, before they have had a chance to act on the nervous system. But these enzymes need to be improved, developed and translated into field use.

Troy Wymore, Jerry Parks, Larry Avens  and myself  have received a small amount of grant money over the last year or so from NNSA and DOE to work on this using calculations of reaction mechanisms and enzyme engineering. Together with Paul Langan and colleagues we wish to combine these calculations with neutron crystallography to rationally improve these enzymes. We have submitted a paper detailing our first findings, which were quite surprising and exciting and could lead the research in a somewhat different direction. Soon, if, and only if, nerve gas bioscavenging research is properly funded over a long enough period, there will be a primary prophylaxis that military and civilians will be able to use in the form of an injection, patch or pill that will neutralize sarin and other nerve gases before they get a chance to work. This would render any chemical weapons strike useless, which is about as good a deterrent as one could imagine.

However, we, and others in the field,  have had a hard time getting sustained funding for this. It's not that the idea of sarin bioscavanging enzymes is particularly controversial - just that, as usual, the will has not been there to divert money from other, less effective programs to fund development of this technology. $150M over 5 years would probably solve the problem. Financially this makes so much sense, compared to the cost and uncertainty of missile strikes.

And, had this research been funded sufficiently earlier, all those children could have been saved.

Do not trust atoms

Thanks: Thomas Splettstoesser.

Mysterious Melted Forts

Some readers will know that we spend some time characterizing glass-like properties of proteins obtained by cooling to low temperatures. Well, another kind of glass transition happened in various Iron Age forts in Western Europe. Something heated them up, melted the rock, and on cooling the rock vitrified. Here's one that the admirably knowledgeable John Dye kindly took us to see  -The Torr in Shielfoot, Argyll.

Photo: Stephine Smith.

John and his colleagues managed to reproduce the vitrification in the lab using a temperature of 850C.
But why would the ancients have done this?  Destruction? Ceremony? Analytical chemistry can tell us nothing about how the temperature was achieved and even less about the motives for the burning.

Milestone in Cellulosic Ethanol Production

A milestone appears to have been reached in cellulosic ethanol production  when INEOS Bio announced that its Indian River gasification and fermentation plant is now producing cellulosic ethanol at commercial scale from waste matter.  Maybe this is the needed commercial breakthrough?

USA neutron scattering - behind Asia?

I just got back from the International Conference on Neutron Scattering in Edinburgh. The conference went very well and had, I believe, a record attendance. Arguably, the provenance of the invited talks gives some indication of the relative worldwide influence of the various continents on the field worldwide. Ignoring the Europeans, whose numbers are likely to have been inflated by the geographic proximity of Scotland, it is perhaps reasonable to compare Asia in this regard with the USA. Of the 175 lectures 25 were from the USA compared to 41 from Asia.  It would appear, then, that the USA still has some catching up to do?