Old words and phrases translated

On By Catherine HausteinIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

A Shakespeare (1582-1616)  troupe will be in Pella this week. I must confess, I find Shakespeare’s comedies really funny. The wording is hard to understand sometimes though because commonly used colloquial phrases have changed quite a lot. In honor of this, I’ve put together a list of words and phrases used back in the 16-1700s. I got these not from Shakespeare but from a play called She Would and She Would Not by Colley Cibber 1671-1757. (This play caught my eye because it has a strong female lead character who was one of Dora Jordan’s greatest roles.) Can you figure out what they mean? What phrases of today will be confusing to future generations? Have I missed any of your favorites?

1.Pry’thee

2. Artful vs artless

3. I’ll Break no square

4. Quotha

5. Odzooks

6. Puppy

7. How now?

Ready for the answers?

Key:

  1. Pry’thee also prithee means “pray thee”. It sounds nice. Almost like please. But it was more like WTF.
  2. Artful vs artless We’ve all heard of Artful Dodger. Someone artful is shrewd, crafty, skilled. Artless sounds like the person would be a clod but it means without deceit, innocent, natural.
  3. I’ll Break no square– my best guess is that this means I’ll not step out of line or formation.
  4. quota “quoth he” but not particularly nice, kind of like “so he says” or “yeah right”
  5. odzooks  similar to gadzooks (aka “yikes”)  meaning God’s hook or the nails that held Christ to the cross. Creepy, don’t you think?
  6. puppy can mean a vain young man, a puppet, or a dog, the former in She Would and She Would Not 
  7. How now? means “what” or more often, “what’s up?”. Famously used to show skill in elocution as in How now brown cow?”

 

 

Periodic betrayal or clueless man?

On By Catherine HausteinIn gender, UncategorizedLeave a comment

thIn every profession, the newcomers rely on the old guard to help them make their way. There are many tales, as that of The Tragic Triumph of M.S. Tswett, where the established powers fail to recognize the achievements of the outsider. Sadly, science is a human endeavor and one can’t write about women in science without mentioning bias and harassment. My observation is that this is most common in that bastion of male dominion, physics. In a recent study of women in astronomy, 82% of them had heard sexiest remarks, 57% had enjoyed verbal sexual harassment, and 9% physical harassment. To put it into perspective, part of getting a Ph.D. is to put up with the abuse of the powerful, but this shouldn’t include sexism. When you reply on those who sexually harass you for approval and letters of reference, it’s a powerless place to be. This is nothing new.

Lise Meitner is a famous case of sexism and betrayal. This occurred at the hands of a male colleague who she considered a close friend. Did this happen hundreds of years ago? No. Less than 100 years ago, in the 1940s science saw perhaps its most infamous blackguard in the person of one Nobel prize winner, Otto Hahn.

Dr. Meitner earned a doctorate in physics in 1905. In 1918, she and her lab partner, Otto Hahn, discovered protactinium. They began a series of experiments designed to make a heavier element than uranium, the largest natural element. They did this by hitting uranium with subatomic particles known as neutrons. Instead of getting larger, the uranium got smaller. It was surely puzzling.

Lise was born to a rich Jewish family and had to flee to the Netherlands during this time of Hitler’s power. However, she had plenty of time to think and wrote to her partner, Hahn, about a new process that they were observing: fission.

Hahn published and later won the Nobel prize for his discover of fission. Did he take the trouble to mention his lab partner of thirty years, who interpreted the results of the experiment for him? No. He did not. In fact, he spoke badly about her behind her back. His excuse: She was in exile when the famous paper had been written. She had won a “Woman of the Year” prize. Wasn’t that enough for her? She was portrayed as having fled Germany with the secret of the bomb and giving it to the Allies. For this, Hahn saw her as a traitor. This whole treatment shattered her self confidence.

Lise herself spoke of the overt sexism she faced. She said that being a woman was “almost half a crime.” She was sad about her treatment by Hahn, but never did despair about not getting the Nobel Prize for her discovery. It had been used to make a weapon and for this she held remorse. Hahn himself never rested easy with it. To honor Lise, element 109 was named Meitnerium. Is there a Hahnium? Well, it was once proposed as a name for element 105, but in the end, this element was named Dubnium after a town in Russia. At least on the periodic table, there’s no place for a sexist jerk.

 

Leap Year and Forget-Me-Nots

On By Catherine HausteinIn plants and animals, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Forget-Me-Not-2_small.jpgphoto from here

There’s a connection between Leap year and Forget-Me-Nots. It’s said that Forget-Me-Nots should be given to friends who depart on a journey on Feburary 29th.

The pretty perennials which are able to grow in the shady and wet places in a garden are associated with other legends as well. It’s said that they were the flower of Henry IV when he was sent off to exile. They are alleged to be the flowers that remind old folks of their young lost loves. Religious lore says they got their name when God named all the plants and animals and nearly forgot them because they were so small. It’s hard to imagine them being forgotten, as these plants are pervasive. Perhaps their tendency to spread is why they are a symbol of everlasting love.

They are members of the Borage family and used in some medicines including those for eczema, ADHD, and milk production. They can be found in over the counter skin care products. However, they contain Pyrrolizidine alkaloids that can drop a mouse dead in five minutes so don’t try self-medicating. Related plants are bluebells and Hounds tooth (burs). They are the State Flower of Alaska.

Here’s hoping you have a wonderful Leap Year and remember those you wish to and forget the rest!

The Tragic Triumph of M.S. Tswett

On By Catherine HausteinIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

photo-155

My heart breaks for a lot of people in history. Without any sort of social safety net or obstetrics or valid peer review, life was pretty crummy for many of them. M.S. Tswett is one of those heartbreakers. Almost every week, I use one of his discoveries with applications very similar to his, for in 1903, he discovered chromatography while studying chemicals in plants. Thirty years later, it became an accepted technique. Too bad he was already dead!

Before chromatography, when a chemist wanted to separate a complex mixture, say, things in a plant leaf or stem, the chemist had to chemically isolate and crystallize the molecules of study. Most of the time, this was done through a series of chemical reactions. Tswett was a botanist and he did things differently. He separated plant pigments, various types of chlorophylls, carotenes,  and xanthophylls, by allowing the chemicals to be washed through a tube of solid material. The differences in chemical attraction between the solvent and the solid and the pigments caused them to separate in bands. The ones that had more in common with the solvent moved faster through the tube. The ones more attracted to the solid came out later. This is pretty much the basis of one of the most widely used chemical techniques ever–chromatography

Little Mikhail Semenovich Tswett had a sad start. He was born to Russian parents during their vacation in Italy. (His mother was originally from Italy so perhaps she went there to visit family.) It’s not known if he was an early surprise but soon after, his mother died. Mikhail was left in Switzerland, frequently visited by his father, who gained a new family He was ever to be a man without a country. He got a Ph.D.in Switzerland and moved to Russia afterwards to be near his father. Sadly, his non-Russian thesis wasn’t acceptable in that country, nor was Mikhail’s accent. He sounded more French than Russian! He ended up getting another Ph.D. and became a professor (for female students) in Poland  where he developed his famous technique. Was it an overnight sensation? No. His chromatography of brown algae pigments gave a different result than the crystallization results of the famous botanist Molisch in  Prague. This made the poor Tswett a bit of an outcast. Another botanist, who later won the Nobel Prize, Willszateter, couldn’t reproduce Tswett’s work (it was later discerned that he didn’t have the right chemicals.)  Chromatography was declared “odd” and pretty much ignored. Tswett must have struggled financially because it wasn’t until he was forty that he married a librarian and companion in his lab work. Tswett had to flee back to Russia during WWI and died there at age 47, unable to overcome the declaration of his work as odd.

Chromatography means color (chroma) writing (graphein) but Tswett also means color in Russian. Pretty cool, isn’t it? I wonder if he ever suspected that his name would be on so many lips over a hundred years after it was discovered.

This blog entry is dedicated to the release of a new book, Pawn of the Phoenix, a detective novel set in 1903, the year of chromatography’s birth.

 

Bean nutrition, a recipe, and a book

On By Catherine HausteinIn plant molecules, UncategorizedLeave a comment

At a cook out, I’ve always liked the beans better than the hamburger. They have a more complex flavor. There’s a reason for that. Beans are packed with good things. Beans are one of my favorite plants to study because they contain a wide variety of water soluble compounds. Since the chemicals are water soluble, they are easy to get out of the beans without complicated processes, making them wonderful plant for college students to work with safely. I’ve  studied velvet beans and you’ll find them in Natural Attraction.

Beans contain all sorts of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, and there are a wide variety of amino acids in beans.  Nutrition chemists don’t just look at amino acid content when evaluating the nutrient content of beans. They also look at how animals absorb the nutrients. Yes, that means they look at animal excrement and see how much of the amino acids are in there. The more in the excrement, the less nutritional the beans. Cooking beans makes the amino acids more easily absorbed. Believe it or not, even how the beans are stored and processed affects the amino acid availability. Beans stored dry and then cooked are more nutritious than those stored or canned in water.

Besides amino acids, beans contain “phenolics,” a fancy word for specific kinds of antioxidants that are regarded as healthy to hearts and might prevent cancer. Red beans contain more of these chemicals than white beans.

Of course, beans are known to increase flatulence thanks to their fiber content, which gives intestinal bacteria a work out and they in turn produce gas. This can be decreased by taking an enzyme that will help break down the starchy part of the beans.

For a recipe for red beans and rice, and a peak at an exciting new Young Adult multicultural novel by author Kelly Cain, please go here. And congratulations Kelly on your book ALTERED out today.

 

Why do balls bounce?

On By Catherine HausteinIn Uncategorized2 Comments

In honor of a new sports romance written by my friend Jim Cagney, I thought I’d talk some about why things bounce. To understand this, let’s look at one of the first popular bouncy substance, a natural material, rubber.It’s a long chain of molecules, a polymer. There are many natural polymers, collagen for example, is a natural protein found in skin.Polymeric things tend to bounce when dropped because the stringy chains are arranged in a somewhat messy structure that’s actually very efficient. When something is dropped it picks up energy and when it hits a surface it absorbs some of the energy into its structure. This energy can be used to create heat, sound, or to become a counter force. As Isaac Newton said, for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Rigid structures will more likely absorb the impact into their structures and become hot or even break bonds. Not polymers, they are apt to react with bounce because they are elastic. The energy of the drop will compress the molecules and then, the molecules will regain their shape and bounce back. Think about what happens when a ball is dropped on a surface that isn’t hard. Lots of the energy goes into squishing that surface down and the ball won’t bounce as high because it has given away energy.

Basketballs are made a little differently from a golf ball or a bouncy ball. They are a hollow bladder filled with air with a polymer coating. This polymer is often leather which is collagen, the skin protein. The air molecules inside the ball do a great job of moving in response to hitting a surface. But they don’t like to be near each other–air likes to fill space, much like paper on my desk. The ball will distort when it hits the floor but quickly get a push back from the air and bounce. The more force you put into the dribble, the higher the bounce.

Congratulations to Jim on his book, On the Rebound. Available here.

 

 

 

 

No more dust bowls

On By Catherine HausteinIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

One reason I became a scientist and specifically an analytical chemist is because of the role analytical chemistry has played in the environmental movement. Before methods for detecting pollution became advanced, people thought that the earth swept away pollution with some sort of Mother Nature’s magic wand. Of course, the pollution was still there, undetected by the crude tests. When I was a student, things had changed. The new methods and often sophisticated equipment created a new era of testing. The Earth would be clean again. We’d find all the pollution and get rid of it. I had such hope! Then came politics. Some politicians deny pollution as if their pocketbook depended on it. Names will not be mentioned.

One of my most despised pollutants is particulates. An Iowa politician is known for claiming that particulate pollution isn’t harmful. At first I thought he was just not informed. I sent him articles about the particulates and their dangers. He ignored them. This is why pollution hasn’t been tamed. Guys like him who don’t care about your health. So I’m here to tell you, these things are bad. They clog your lungs, they hurt your heart. They create haze.

There are two sizes, PM 10 from dust and grinding was the size associated with the dust bowl. These coarse particles can contribute to heart disease, pneumonia, and bronchitis. These particles are associated with the dust bowl, which is why I’m posting about them today. A friend has a book out about the hardships of this time. You can find it here. It’s good!

Those big particulates can kill but even worse are the small ones, PM 2.5. These come from combustion and other chemical reactions—cars, cigarettes, cooking indoors, fires, and power plants are among their creators. These cause all the problems of big particulates but they dive deeper into the lungs and are more dangerous. You can follow particulate pollution here (US) and here (world).

We all know that the Dust Bowl killed people. Let’s not repeat it. Be sure to write your elected official. There are ways to scrub and keep particulates out of the atmosphere. Shouldn’t this be law?

Iowa caucuses

On By Catherine HausteinIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I’m sure you’re all wondering what will happen at the Iowa caucuses. I can’t predict. I can tell you what happens at a caucus though.

A caucus is a party discussion about what candidate should run for president. Most people who go to a caucus have put some effort into looking over the candidates and deciding if they have the organization and the message to appeal to voters. A caucus is run by volunteers who see it as a privilege and  honor to vet the candidates. When a person goes to a caucus, they need to sign a pledge of support for the party. What happens to people who go to the caucus to support the weakest candidate? I can’t say it doesn’t happen but I haven’t seen it happen and it would be fraud.

At a caucus, people separate into precincts or wards based on address. Each ward has a captain and a secretary that can be voted out by the people. Usually they aren’t though because there is a lot of paperwork that goes with reporting and verifying the results. Once everyone agrees on the captain and secretary, a representative for each candidate will give a compelling talk about why you should side with that candidate. Then the Republicans vote and the Democrats separate into groups to be counted. Each vote or person is counted. Then the number of delegates each candidate will get is determined. These delegates are to go on to a county convention and eventually some will go to the national convention. If a candidate doesn’t have enough votes or people to get a delegate, the people who supported that person can either realign with a different candidate or talk others into joining their camp. Another vote is taken. Then the results get sent to the party headquarters.

Most people leave at this point but those who stay gather resolutions about what the party should stand for. These are voted on and become the party platform. Have you ever looked at your parties’ platform? You should. So should the candidates. Here is the Iowa Democratic party platform and the Republican one.

Nutmeg: the good and the bad

On By Catherine HausteinIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

th-6I’m sure that, like me, you were all sitting around this morning wondering if a person can get high from nutmeg. The short answer is yes, but please read on.

Nutmeg is a holiday spice made from the seed of Myristica fragrant, a tree related to pines. It’s widely used in China to treat stomach problems. It’s been found that nutmeg has anti-microbial properties and can kill bacteria associated with stomach cancer, colin cancer, and inflammatory bowl problems. A recent study done by researchers in the U.S, and China shows that nutmeg can reduce levels of a chemical associated with colin cancer and creates a more healthy intestinal environment. Nutmeg also contains antioxidants.

An earlier study in Japan showed that nutmeg can help contribute to a healthy liver. So yay! Let’s eat a bunch of nutmeg. Well, no. Not a good idea. The potent nutmeg chemical myristicin can also give you diarrhea, dizziness, and make your heart race. It can cause hallucinations but not the sweet dream or enlightening kind.It’s been compared to having the flu or Montezuma’s revenge. Like most things having to do with plant chemicals, tread lightly. Remember, chemicals are a plant’s way of talking. Their words are potent.

Here’s a funny observation: I went to buy some nutmeg today and the store was out! What does that mean? Are people in Pella tripping out on nutmeg?