Ooh, I Love Fluorescent Compounds! It's A Great Reward For The Long Process Of Synthesis.

Copper essential for burning fat, researchers find             

Though small amounts of copper are essential to health - oysters, liver, beans and nuts are good sources - copper’s role in metabolism has been unclear: Some studies found that it boosted fat burning, others that it depressed it.

University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have now clarified the critical role that copper plays in nutrition: It helps move fat out of fat cells - called adipocytes - and into the blood stream for use as energy.

Without enough copper, fat builds up in fat cells without being utilized, said Christopher Chang, the Class of 1942 Chair and a professor of chemistry and of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley.

“Unlike other studies that link copper levels both to increased or decreased fat metabolism, our study shows definitively how it works - it’s a signal that turns on fat cells,” said Chang, who also is a faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “If we could find a way to burn fat more efficiently, this could be a big contribution to dealing with obesity and diabetes.”

The new study appeared online this week, and will be published in the July print issue of the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

“Copper regulates cyclic-AMP-dependent lipolysis” by Lakshmi Krishnamoorthy, Joseph A Cotruvo Jr, Jefferson Chan, Harini Kaluarachchi, Abigael Muchenditsi, Venkata S Pendyala, Shang Jia, Allegra T Aron, Cheri M Ackerman, Mark N Vander Wal, Timothy Guan, Lukas P Smaga, Samouil L Farhi, Elizabeth J New, Svetlana Lutsenko and Christopher J Chang in Nature Chemical Biology. Published online June 6 2016 doi:10.1038/nchembio.2098

Caption: The crystal structure of the cAMP-degrading enzyme phosphodiesterase PDE3B, showing two magnesium atoms (green) in the active site. Copper binds one of the amino acid residues in the pink loop at the left, blocking the activity of the enzyme. Credit: Lakshmipriya Krishnamoorthy and Joseph Cotruvo Jr., UC Berkeley

There was a brief period of time my junior year of undergrad when I wanted to be an organic chemist, so I took the graduate level organic synthesis class.

This wasn’t even the advanced ochem class, it was specifically synthesis for actual organic chemists, and it was just me and two other undergrads surrounded by first year grad students.

Anyways, the exams were these hellish two hour affairs which probably stand as the most difficult exams I’ve ever taken, and we all knew they were going to be bad going into the first midterm but not how bad.

So about forty minutes into the first two hour midterm one of the grad students gets up and turns in his test. The rest of us were like still on the first page so we were all kind of impressed that he was done already.

He leaves the room, and then from the hallway we hear him yell “fucking fuck,” and I think that was the purest expression of how midterms and finals feel that I have ever encountered.

‘BLOOD LAMP’ Mike Thompson, an artist based in Amsterdam, wanted to design a piece that forced people to think about the cost of the power they use. So he made a lamp lit with the user’s blood. His “Blood Lamp” glows thanks to a reaction with luminol, a molecule used in police forensics that gives off electric blue light when exposed to an iron-rich protein in blood called hemoglobin. Iron atoms catalyze the oxidation of luminol, creating a high-energy, unstable peroxide molecule that releases energy as blue light as it relaxes to its low-energy ground state. After the user adds blood and the reaction consumes all of the luminol, the light fades, and the lamp can never be used again.

Credit: Mike Thompson

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I originally started making this material not necessarily for armors but more for cars and trains. [I wanted it] to squeeze like a sponge, but in a heavy duty kind of form of a sponge so we could put it in front of the car or a high speed train and take care of the impact. But when we saw the performance of the material, we started thinking about ballistics and bullets. And so I tested those and we saw that…the material can perform.

Afsaneh Rabiei. He developed a metal foam that is lightweight, strong, heat- and radiation-resistant, and, when incorporated in a bulletproof vest, for example, capable of shattering bullets on impact without injuring the person wearing it.

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Three muscle fibers; the middle has a defect found in some neuromuscular diseases

Of the three muscle fibers shown here, the one on the right and the one on the left are normal. The middle fiber is deficient a large protein called nebulin (blue). Nebulin plays a number of roles in the structure and function of muscles, and its absence is associated with certain neuromuscular disorders.

Image courtesy of Christopher Pappas and Carol Gregorio, University of Arizona. Part of the exhibit Life:Magnified by ASCB and NIGMS.