It can't hurt for asking...

I had wanted to acquire some fossils to go show ego_id_non_feci's monsters, but the local fossil shop has a "returns for in-store credit only" policy. I had also been unable to find a source of inexpensive trilobites for the sensory table/archaeological dig and, while I had petrified wood for each child to take home, I was discontent with the items I had to show, so I was being sort of grumpy. But then I got over it and decided that I may as well ask if I could have a waiver to the return policy - the worst they could say was no, right? And that would simply leave me right where I was currently, with only my personal collection to show. So I called, and they were actually willing to let me borrow a lot more than I would have been comfortable putting on my credit card as a purchase. :) I ran by, picked out a boxful and returned them promptly after class.

Three cheers for Burnie's Rock Shop for supporting the sciences in education!

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Remember when the world was new?

I always enjoy interacting with little monsters, the energy, the wonder and the joy they exude is amazing. There really is little more rewarding than explaining something new to a kid. Whether it be science or music or crafts, so much of the world is new and interesting to them, it is neat to go back to that time with them and see with fresh eyes. Bringing the dinosaur bits into a classroom of little people was a very exciting experience, although I didn't quite know what to do with the assertions that they could see Spider Man in the dinosaur bone marrow. :P This was the first time I had a show-and-tell-and-touch presentation rather than a watch-as-I-make-things-blow-up-THEN-touch sort of presentation, and I think I will do things slightly differently if I use that format again. (Thirty grabby little hands is a lot to keep track of!) Still, there were a lot of really good questions and I think they learned stuff or, at the very least, enjoyed themselves.

ego_id_non_feci, sometimes I think you have the best job in the world - playing with munchkins all day and constantly being exposed to that brightness has to be intoxicating. Granted, I'm enough of a dork to thing finding the solution to a particularly difficult equation, teaching a new string art to someone, or creating an eloquent grant proposal to be great fun too... :P  Perhaps I'm just blessed to be able to participate in many different flavors of "work" and learning.

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Midsummer in late winter

This evening, mightyjesse  and I drove down to CAM to see gwyneth1362's son in A Midsummer Night's Dream. They were supposedly doing it is a futuristic/alternate universe setting, but I was a little confused by some of the costuming choices. They seemed to be recycling a fair number of costumes from when they staged it as set in the 1950's. It probably is a budgetary decision, at least in part, but it was still a little odd. It was also a little weird to have lines and scenes cut to make the production more "family friendly." Ah well, the acting was good all around and the boy was a wonderful Lysander. :) Bravo!

Afterward, we went out for desert with a bunch of folks and it was lovely to be able to just sit and chat for a few hours before heading back for Madison. I had my Thing to do, but more on that on Sunday...

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Alright. To bed with me now. I have folks coming over tomorrow to work on some Gulf Wars favors and I have my own considerable list of things that must be completed before War, so tomorrow must be an uber-productive day.

So sweet!

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/2000-year-old-a.html?npu=1&mbid=yhp

http://decodingtheheavens.com/

Poor froggie is part of a physics experiment and being levitated by magnets!







And levitating water:



And the explanation for the nerds and the just interested

OK - a little professional rant here about the evils of the drug companies. Stick with me - this is longish and delves into chemistry and molecular structures, but I promise it will make sense and be worth it in the end.

When drugs lose their patent and generics are about to hit the market, the Evil Drug Companies have several nasty little tricks to extend the patent. Once way is getting approval for new indications, another is bringing lawsuits against the generic manufacturers for technicalities, and another is by coming out with a "new" copy-cat drug that they market as being better than the original. It is this third case I would like to discuss today.

Because of the way that carbons work in molecular structures, sometimes there are "chiral carbons" - carbons where the other molecules that stick to them can be arranged in one of two specific ways. This makes it so that there are essentially two drugs with the same chemical structure, but that are put together just slightly differently. The molecules are non-superimposable mirror images of one another. A great visual analogy to this is your hands - they both have a thumb and four fingers, but you have a right and a left and no matter how you turn them, they will never be the same. In fact, sometimes these carbons are referred to as "right-handed" or "left-handed" because of some optical effects they have in solution.

Anyway, usually, they way the molecules (fingers) are stuck onto the carbon (hand) are random and often it turns out to be about a 50/50 mix when the drug is made in the lab (it is possible for there to be other ratios but how and why that happens is complicated and beyond the scope of this post). Sometimes, both forms of the drug work just fine, sometimes there is one or the other that is responsible for the activity and/or side effects of the original mixture. Think of the activity sites in the body as gloves - sometimes you have a stretchy knit mitten - anything vaguely hand-shaped will do - but sometimes you have a tailored leather right handed driving glove and only the right hand of the person the glove was designed for will fit it. It is the same way with drugs- sometimes that chiral carbon matters, sometimes it doesn't.

So... the Evil Drug Companies, seeing that their big earner is about to lose its patent, will sometimes try to figure out which of the molecules is the active or more active form. They can usually then either figure out how to manufacture just that type or how to separate the two molecules after they are made. This does two things - it usually makes the process more expensive and it means that they can patent this "new" drug as a brand name drug. With sufficient advertising, they can even make people believe that this "new" drug is better than the old one. That is usually a lie. Sometimes both of the molecules were active and one was just chosen for its patentability. Sometimes the inactive or less active one was just "junk" - essentially taking up space but not doing anything. Rarely is the side effect or efficacy rate significantly changed by these little tricks.

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Some examples:

Claritin (loratadine) 10 mg and Clarinex (desloratadine) 5 mg
See? They are using the right-handed molecule (ergo the "des" prefix on the generic name) and only using half as much, because they have taken out the left-handed loratadine that presumably was inactive. Now they have a drug that can be prescription only and brand name! Yay! Money for the Evil Drug Company!

Celexa (citalopram) vs Lexapro (escitalopram)
This one is a little harder to do the direct comparison because it comes in multiple dosage strengths. (In this care, it is an antidepressant that can work at different strengths for different people.) However, in general, the Lexapro doses are half the Celexa doses. This time it is the left-handed molecule that is used (es = S = sinister = left).

Prilosec (omeprazole) 20 mg and Nexium (esomeprazole) 20 mg
Oooh! My favorite. Remember all those ads about the "Purple Pill"? Remember when they started talking about the "NEW Purple Pill" and the pill got these adorable gold stripes on it? They were trying to get people to stick with the brand name product when omeprazole went generic and the generics were shockingly no longer in a purple capsule. Horrors! It won't work if it is not in a purple capsule! They touted all this "evidence" that Nexium (oooh! even the name implies progress!) worked better than omeprazole, but if you look at this mathematically - if the left-handed molecule is the one that works and the dose of both the mixed drug omeprazole (active and inactive) and the "pure" drug esomeprazole (all active) is 20 mg, which would you expect to work better? Perhaps the one with twice as much active ingredient? Shocking. But they don't want you to take two of the cheap-o $0.60 pills when you could take their $6.00 per pill Purple Pills! Look! they are shiny! and Purple!

Thalidomide
Thalidomide is a chiral drug too and only one of its molecules is responsible for the terrible birth defects seen in children of women who took it during pregnancy. However, it (and many others) cannot be marketed as a single type of drug because the human body can interconvert the two types of molecule and change the beneficial form into the teratogenic form after the drug is consumed. Some other drugs have this conversion happen too, but it can be of little or no consequence if the other form is benign or beneficial.

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So, the take home message - when your doctor prescribes something - especially something you have seen a lot of commercials about - it is worth asking the doctor and/or your pharmacist if there is something older, cheaper, and just as good. Often, there is. Keep your money, don't give it to the Evil Drug Companies!


For those of you dorks interested in details:
Chirality the basic background chemistry
Enantiomers includes a list of drugs where this technique has been used

Last night ego_id_non_feci came over after work. I knew she was going to have a stressful day, so I had prepared some de-stressing materials for her. First, I have been educating her about Scotch, so we each had a Scotch monkey of Glenlivet 12. Yum! Then I also had a tasty, tasty new book to share - Moda a Firenze. I splurged and bought it and cannot say I regret it in the least. All y'all late period folks need to appreciate how lucky you are to have such wonderful portraits and freaking EXTANT GARMENTS to work from when doing research. It is so easy it is almost cheating. Fun cheating, pretty cheating, but cheating. :P

Speaking of  ego_id_non_feci , last night she had pictures for me of my last torturing the kids day. I went and taught them about microorganisms. Many of them have been sick, so they were interested in germs and such. We talked about bad germs and good bacteria, and yeast-y beasites and then made bread. For the explosion part of the experiments, we had a yeast volcano. *grin* D, my little buddy, just could not contain himself - he had to be touching my table, the experiments or me, pretty much all afternoon.


Showing the yeast bubbles in bread, with D sticking his head into the photo. :)


Kids consuming their little loaves.

Heh. After the little monsters made the bread I had SO many little floury handprints on my pants from around-the-knees hugs. Happily, the little loaves apparently turned out OK, even with the rough and probable over-kneading they received.

Now... just to come up with not-too-dangerous things to do with fire, the next topic that has been requested...

Thanks to damej for tipping me off to this article, published two weeks ago in JAMA and exerpted below.



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Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy

"It is possible that the therapeutic efficacy of medications is affected by commercial features such as lower prices... Each participant was informed by brochure about a (purported) new opioid analgesic approved by the Food and Drug Administration; it was described as similar to codeine with faster onset time, but it was actually a placebo pill. After randomization, half of the participants were informed that the drug had a regular price of $2.50 per pill and half that the price had been discounted to $0.10 per pill... In the regular-price group, 85.4% (95% confidence interval [CI], 74.6%-96.2%) of the participants experienced a mean pain reduction after taking the pill, vs 61.0% (95% CI, 46.1%-75.9%) in the low-price (discounted) group (P = .02)."(emphasis and colors added – jsh) JAMA. 2008;299(9):1016-1017.

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*snerk* Would you like a regular or extra-strength placebo?

How very odd... 

Hexapus discovered!

It has been a very long day and it will not be an easy couple weeks, so I am pleased to stumble across a little amusing oddity.

Today, I made Science!

Specifically, I invaded ego_id_non_feci's class and had Mad Dr. Jean's Science Hour. She had been telling me about her class and what they were studying and I kept saying. "you know, there's this really fun experiment..." About the third time I found myself saying that, I stopped myself and instead asked if I could maybe just come in and play with the kids myself. *grin*

As it turns out, that is not only allowed, but encouraged as an enriching experience for the kids. Further, because I am a science professional and demonstrating something at least tangentially in my field and certainly within my training, they can submit my activities as justification to get extra funding! Yay! So I am going to get to host Mad Dr. Jean's Science Hour periodically - probably every two weeks or monthly, depending on what the kids are interested in learning about.

I tried to teach things at a very basic level and keep the "lesson plan" very simple. The older kids (5 year olds) seemed to really get it and ask some really good questions, but the little ones (three year olds) mainly were just impressed by the cool experiments. Retention of the information would be nice, but I really have four goals for these classes :  1) Science is cool, 2) Science explains many of the things they see and do every day, 3) Girls do science, too, and 4) Science makes things blow up - so you need to be very careful, but you can do really nifty things with it.

We studied phases today, since they were interested in water and it is fun to show ice-water-steam... and then I pulled out the dry ice for real fun with vapor. By the time I was done, half the tiled area was covered with soap bubbles and/or water, but everyone had fun. And I think I really got them to understand how heat changes states by having them be little dancing molecules. :)


Cloud showers were the most popular part of the presentation.


The joys of water and carbon dioxide!


Playing with a cloud in a bucket.

ego_id_non_feci will have more pictures for me later, so I may add those at some point.