Photo by Sarah Deragon, PortraitsToThePeople

I am lucky enough to live in Hayes Valley, I’ve been living here for about four years now and have been privy to great community engagement; especially around the park at Hayes and Octavia. There is such a diversity of people that congregate in the park and one of the new neighbors has definitely added to the charm of the environs – Smitten Ice Cream.

The first flavor I tried was salted caramel, and it was hands down the best ice cream I had ever tasted. Since then, when I have guests visiting, I make sure that one of the local stops is Smitten. The ice cream is made to order only using the freshest local ingredients and it is frozen within 60 seconds using liquid nitrogen with a freezing point of -321 degrees F or 76 degrees Kelvin giving it a unique texture.

I heard Robyn Sue Goldman, owner of Smitten and Cory Bloome, the engineer responsible for fine tuning Robyn’s first prototype to mix the ice cream, speak about Smitten on Wednesday, January 18th at Nerd Nite. Smitten’s story from wagon to the Hayes Valley location is a great blend of quality and innovation. Robyn’s initial vision with Smitten was to get closer to the cow. With traditional ice cream that is frozen with conventional techniques, the texture is often stabilized with additives, emulsifiers or preservatives which mask natural ingredients. Old-fashioned ice cream in contrast has a few simple ingredients but takes quite some time to freeze. Introducing liquid nitrogen enabled Robyn to create ice cream the old fashioned way without the wait time.

The first ice cream machine was created and tested by Robyn through trial and error over many years. One of the major hurdles was to create a mixing apparatus that could properly and consistently mix the ice cream, without over-freezing or under-freezing any portion of it, which is easy to do with liquid nitrogen. She developed and later patented her creation of two swirling mixing arms with a helix design. She named the unique, patented mixer "Kelvin," giving tribute to the measurement of intense cold. Kelvin’s design, with the help of liquid nitrogen, creates a lower ice cream-freezing temperature while perfecting the mixing technique, resulting in the formation of smaller ice crystals in the finished product. These exceptionally small ice crystals are the reason why Smitten Ice Cream is so intensely creamy. To test her invention, Robyn initially hit the streets of San Francisco with Kelvin strapped on top of a Radio Flyer wagon and made incredible ice cream to-order. Popularity for Smitten Ice Cream grew, and the need for a store became tangible.

Before a store could be created, Kelvin needed to be refurbished and approved by UL, the regulatory agent. That is where Cory Bloome came in, affectionately dubbed “The Kelvin Doctor. Cory was the engineer who took Robyn’s prototype and list of improvements and fabricated the next generation of Kelvin’s for the store.

The four Kelvins are now busy mixing at the Smitten storefront at 432 Octavia St. (@ Linden St.). Try it for yourself if you find yourself in the neighborhood. Ice cream is served each day starting at noon. Monday through Thursday and Sunday, the ice cream is put away at 9pm; yet, Friday and Saturday you can come as late as 10pm for your fix.

The nose of the star-nosed mole is much more sensitive than the human hand. Credit: Dr. Ken Catania, Vanderbilt University

Pain is the most common reason for trips to the doctor's office. So it makes sense that pain treatment is a huge part of our healthcare system, costing more than 100 billion dollars a year. But how exactly pain works is still a mystery in many ways.

Like any normal 9-year-old, Maddie Burkhardt was playing outside with her friends last summer, racing around in a pedal go-cart.

"And my foot slipped and it went under the go-cart. Like it got bent backwards," she says.

Maddie broke a bone in her foot. So, her mom, Danielle, took her to see a podiatrist, who put her in a series of casts.

"And every time he took the cast off, he said 'ok, you should feel much better now.' And she was just like 'no, it's killing me," says Danielle.

As the weeks went by, it became clear that Maddie's pain wasn't normal. "She would not allow anything to touch her foot at all. And we didn't really know what was going on," says Danielle.

Listen to the QUEST radio story The Science of Pain

Even a light touch, like the wind blowing, was incredibly painful. "It felt like there was knives in my foot. Like a big elephant smashing on your foot or something," says Maddie.

Maddie was diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome and ended up in a special treatment program at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto.

Dr. Elliot Krane, who heads the program, says "most of the time, pain is the signal that there's a problem and it's a useful sensation to have and a protective one."

But sometimes, our body's warning system goes haywire, like in Maddie's case. Nerve cells send out pain signals even when there's no reason to.

"It's a terrible pain problem," says Dr. Krane. "And it's one that we really don't understand the origins of. And because we understand so little about it, our therapy of it is also very rudimentary.

Krane says Maddie, like most patients, went through a slew of treatments, like physical therapy and pain medication. It took months to recover. "I can't exactly run really yet, but I can walk faster and I can play with my friends and do a lot more," Maddie says.

For the most part, doctors rely on opiates like morphine to control pain. But those drugs aren't very targeted. The challenge is that pain is very difficult to study. "There's other things and other processes in the body which are measurable in some objective fashion: heart rate, blood pressure, temperature. But how do you measure pain?" asks Dr. Krane.

Looking to Nature for Solutions

In a lab at the University of California-Berkeley, Diana Bautista has the same questions about pain. "Many people are trying to figure out how to do this. And we decided to look to nature to solve this problem."

Bautista is an assistant professor of biology at the University of California-Berkeley. She's peering into a large plastic tub filled with dirt.

A star-nosed mole at UC Berkeley. Photo: Kristin Gerhold, Bautista Lab.

"So, if you look here in the corner of the dirt, you can see that there's a star-nosed mole. Pretty interesting looking, right?"

Star-nosed moles have a very unique look. Their large pink nose has 22 finger-like tentacles that they use to feel for food in the dark tunnels where the live.

"What we don't see, that you need special high-speed video to see, is that they're actually tapping very rapidly the surface," says Bautista.

Compared to our fingertips, the mole's star has 10 times more nerve cells. "It's much more sensitive than the human hand."

That lack of sensitivity in human skin makes it difficult to study pain, because our nerve endings are so spread out.

We also have about 20 different kinds of nerve cells. Some detect pain, some detect light touch. Others detect hot and cold. "And so it's very difficult to study one in isolation or to separate the pain cells from the light touch cells."

That's where the star-nosed mole comes in. Its star is densely packed with light touch cells, but not a lot of pain cells. So Bautista says, studying tissue samples of the mole's star can reveal the differences between nerve cells.

"How does one cell feel the prick of the pin and the other feel the feather? We don't know what happens in those nerve endings," says Bautista.

Bautista says knowing what happens in normal nerves can tell a lot about when nerves don't work normally – like when diabetes patients experience numbness or cancer patients have hypersensitivity. That comes down to the biochemistry inside the cells. For that, Bautista is also studying another organism.

Peppers Targeting Nerve Cells

"These are Szechuan peppers that are from the Chinese prickly ash," Bautista says, handing me the peppercorns.

"Chew them a little bit in the front of your mouth."

As I chew, my tongue becomes slightly numb. "It feels like a little buzzing, tingling sensation," says Baustista.

The peppercorns aren't hot, but they do have chemicals that are working on my sense of touch. "We know that they target special receptors and cause those nerves to be excited just as if somebody was tickling your tongue," says Bautista.

That's a trick that humans could copy. "By indentifying the molecular mechanisms, we could really go in and design better drugs and come up with better therapies and alternatives for treating conditions like chronic pain," she says.

Bautista hopes the research will lead to more targeted pain drugs, so patients like Maddie Burkhardt will have an easier recovery.

Check out the star-nosed mole in action:

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Photo taken by fdecomite

One of the more unique scavenger hunts I came across is happening on January 8th in San Francisco. Chemistry in Pictures is a photo scavenger hunt hosted by the Meetup group Experiment with a Chemist.

Chemistry in Pictures asks teams to bring a digital camera (one per team) and follow the clues provided. Each of your discoveries will need to be photographed within a two hour time frame. At the end you'll share your pictures that contain each of the clues and then explain them to the other teams. How awesome and wonderfully nerdy is that?

Here are some examples of clues teams may encounter:

Oxygen (answers may include molecules with oxygen such as water, carbonic acid in soda, Bleach, sugar)
A Crosslinked polymer
A product containing the vitamin Linus Pauling would have suggested that you increase
A sulfur containing product that you eat
An oxidizer
A reducer
Build a molecule of caffeine
Draw a nucleophillic substitution reaction

This sounds like a great event to kick off the New Year. If you'd like to learn more about puzzle hunts of all kinds, visit Puzzalot for more events in the Bay Area.

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The Water Processing Method.

There are some traditions I have around writing. First off, in my apartment I have my write or do nothing chair. The only two things I am allowed to do in it are write or do nothing. It is where I am sitting right now as I am type this. The second tradition is classical musical in the background; this is especially helpful for long bouts of writing requiring more focus. The third is a pot of tea. The third tradition is problematic late at night, as then I don’t sleep due to the caffeine. Which made me ponder an alternative and how it is derived – how is tea decaffeinated?

Real tea comes from the leaves from the Camellia sinesis or Camellia assamica plant . These leaves naturally contain caffeine in varying amounts. Black teas are the most strongly caffeinated while white teas contain the least amount of caffeine. At night, one could drink herbal tea but these are not actually genuine teas. They are just herbal tinctures derived from other plants.

One could enjoy an actual cup of decaffeinated tea by pouring out the first cup and re-steeping. This works best with loose-leaf tea; about 80% of the caffeine in tea is released in the first thirty seconds of steeping. Pouring out the first batch steeped and then adding more hot water will get rid of the majority of caffeine while maintaining the flavor of the tea.

This is the water method of decaffeination. There are three other methods used for decaffeination:

Methylene chloride processing – in this process Methylene chloride is used as a solvent. Molecules of caffeine bond to the molecules of Methylene chloride. This processing can be done directly in a bath of Methylene chloride or indirectly by extracting the caffeine in a water bath.

Ethyl acetate processing – Ethyl acetate is a naturally occurring chemical in most fruits. Caffeine molecules bond to Ethyl acetate and caffeine can be removed either directly or indirectly using Ethyl acetate as the solvent. Products coined as “Naturally decaffeinated” are usually decaffeinated using this method.

Carbon dioxide processing – In this process, water softened materials are “pressure cooked” with the gas. At high pressures, CO2 sublimates and acts as both a gas and a liquid. As a solvent, the non-polar molecules will attract the smaller caffeine molecules. Since the flavor molecules are larger they remain intact. This process retains the flavor of the tea better than the other two solvent methods.

In all these methods some caffeine will remain but it drastically reduced. Federal regulations in the US mandate that labeled decaffeinated products must not contain more the 2.5% caffeine. So what happens to all the caffeine that is taken out in processing? It is put into other products. Soft drinks are primarily caffeinated from the caffeine taken out from decaffeination. So that soft drink might include the caffeine from tea leaves or coffee beans. So by choosing decaffeinated tea tonight, that caffeine was repurposed in another caffeine beverage!

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UCSF biologist Jeff Tabor holds up an ecoli culture designed to display the shape of a squid.

Synthetic biology portends big changes in our lives by ushering in a dizzying array of applications in everything from medicine to biofuels, environmental remediation to agriculture. Though many of these applications haven’t yet come on line, researchers are hard at work to synthesize new drugs and devices made from genetic parts.

For example, there’s an enzyme that exists in plants which makes methyl halides, a molecule which can be catalytically converted into gasoline and other chemicals. Imagine if you could put this enzyme-making gene into yeast, then you could brew the yeast to churn out the methyl halides and after some optimization of the production pathway, you could scale up production to pump out this carbon neutral gasoline precursor for use in today’s automobiles. This is the idea behind an innovative biofuels project that has taken off in the lab of Chris Voigt at UCSF’s School of Pharmacy.

Voigt and his team surveyed the genetic database for the presence of the gene that encodes for the enzyme that makes methyl halides. Lo and behold, the gene exists in plants as diverse as ice plant, which dots the northern California coast, bok choy and pinot noir grapes. After building a library of about 100 enzymes from these diverse plants, the researchers had to determine which of these would function best in the yeast. They zeroed in on an enzyme from ice plant and then used the tool of DNA synthesis to translate the gene for the enzyme that makes methyl halides into something that would work in yeast.

The remarkable thing about this project is that the researchers never actually touched any of the plants. They simply “Googled” a genetic database to find all the genes out there in plants that produce the enzyme that makes methyl halides. As Professor Voigt says, “it’s incredible that synthetic biology is something that could really unlock the potential of using organisms in order to produce fuels.”

Watch the video made by the Voigt Lab demonstrating the combustible property of their synthetically derived methyl halides:

QUEST on KQED Public Media. Video courtesy of
Prof. Chris Voigt, UCSF School of Pharmacy

Watch the Decoding Synthetic Biology television story online.

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<a href="http://www.kqed.org/quest/television/inside-an-explosion2" We see or hear about explosions practically every day on TV–
most people have no idea what an explosion really is.

It’s true that the majority of the work done there is in support of Department of Defense and Department of Energy programs. But contrary to what one might imagine, the scientists there are work that goes on there isn't ALL about figuring out how to protect the U.S. from Communism. The scientists here are chemists, physicists and engineers who are delving into everything from warhead electrical systems to enhanced mammography.

We’re led into the "firing chamber" to meet our explosives guy, Jon Maienschein, who has promised to blow something up for us. I’m excited. It’s hard to make a bad TV segment when an explosion is involved. If you watch television, you will see that many shows live and die by that rule. Maienshein is surprisingly mild-mannered for a guy who blows things up for a living. After interviewing him for about 30 minutes on camera, we finally had a very basic understanding of what’s happening during a detonation.

There are several different kinds of explosions: chemical, natural, mechanical and nuclear, electrical, astronomical, etc. The most common "artificial" explosives are chemical usually involving a violent, rapid oxidation reaction. The fine folks at LLNL demonstrated just such and explosion for us then gave us the super-cool, ultra-slow-motion footage that they shoot in order to study what actually goes on inside an explosion.

We see or hear about explosions practically every day on TV, the movies and in the news, most people have no idea what an explosion really is. What’s happening on the chemical and molecular level? And how do the people who know about explosives actually study explosions? And why is it necessary to understand this stuff? The whole thing is surprisingly complex.

Watch the Inside an Explosion television story online.

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The new FOCE experimental chamber being developed by MBARI scientists.

The scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) are already well-known for uncovering some of the most extreme marine animals in the deep sea, like the incredible vampire squid. But recently, they're using their unique blend of biology and engineering to study one of the least-discussed impacts of climate change: ocean acidification.

When we hear about climate change, we tend of think of the atmosphere – and for good reason. But as MBARI scientists describe, the oceans are a key part of the process. The ocean acts like a giant sponge, absorbing carbon dioxide emissions from the air. And as we add more and more CO2 to air by burning fossil fuels, the ocean is absorbing it. On one level, it's done us a big favor. Scientists say that we would be experiencing much more extreme climate change were it not for the ocean's ability to remove the heat-trapping gas.

However, the carbon dioxide that the ocean absorbs is making the water more acidic. This isn't the first time that the oceans have become more acidic. But as is the case with many impacts of climate change, it's the rate at which acidification is happening that worries scientists the most.

As you can probably guess, the ocean is an incredibly complex system. So ocean acidification poses an interesting question to scientists: what will the impacts be on marine species and ecosystems? What they know already is that there will be winners and losers in more acidic waters. Some creatures may do fine, while others won't be able to adapt in time. Either way, food webs may feel the effects – including webs involving species that humans depend on , like salmon.

Another major concern has to do with marine animals with certain kinds of shells – known as "calcifiers." Corals, clams and others all use carbonate in the water to build their shells out of calcium carbonate. But ocean acidification reduces the amount of carbonate in the water, making it more difficult for them to make shells. That could be devastating for coral reefs, who are already facing a number of stresses.

Even if you're an animal without a shell, ocean acidification could make things difficult. Scientists are studying how much stress this could put on animals that can't regulate their internal pH, or how it could affect the larvae or reproduction of certain species. MBARI scientists are hoping that the flume they are developing to conduct FOCE experiments will help researchers answer some of these questions.

Check out the whole story – watch the "Acidic Seas" audio slide show online.

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Scientist Alex Gash prepares the "frozen smoke."

So when I conceived this Aerogel segment, I had a cooking show in mind. I imagined the mad scientist, standing at his bench in requisite white lab coat and safety glasses, Bunsen burner bubbling away. And the big reveal at the end, pulling a perfectly-formed cylinder of Aerogel from the supercritical extractor. Well, it turns out that the process of making Aerogel isn't terribly visual. Essentially, there's a lot of clear liquid being added to clear liquid. Which becomes clear gel. Then it's put into a machine and it comes out Aerogel.

So, it's a good thing that our chemist, Alex Gash, was a rock star. He was such a good sport, saying the same thing over and over in just slightly different ways without a single complaint. And even though he works with Aerogel (Sol Gel chemistry) every day, it still seemed like he was pretty excited about it.

So, while it's not exactly a cooking show, we hope that our little segment piques your interest to find out more about how Aerogel is made as well as its really interesting applications. Maybe you can even print out the recipe and make it at home.

Watch the "QUEST Lab: Aerogel" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.


Amy Miller is a Coordinating Producer for television on QUEST.

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