Monthly Archives: November 2015

Clearing nanoparticles from blood using electric fields

With all the excitement about using nanoparticles to deliver medication (drugs), there hasn’t been much mention of removing these nanoparticles once they’ve served their purpose. Apparently, there is a new technique which makes removal much easier.

 Caption An artist's representation of the nanoparticle removal chip developed by researchers in Professor Michael Heller's lab at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. An oscillating electric field (purple arcs) separates drug-delivery nanoparticles (yellow spheres) from blood (red spheres) and pulls them towards rings surrounding the chip's electrodes. The image is featured as the inside cover of the Oct. 14 issue of the journal Small. Credit: Stuart Ibsen and Steven Ibsen.

Caption: An artist’s representation of the nanoparticle removal chip developed by researchers in Professor Michael Heller’s lab at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. An oscillating electric field (purple arcs) separates drug-delivery nanoparticles (yellow spheres) from blood (red spheres) and pulls them towards rings surrounding the chip’s electrodes. The image is featured as the inside cover of the Oct. 14 issue of the journal Small. Credit: Stuart Ibsen and Steven Ibsen.

Engineers at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) provide a description of the new technology and the problems with current techniques for removing nanoparticles in a Nov. 20, 2015 UCSD news release (also on EurekAlert but dated Nov. 23, 2015),

Engineers at the University of California, San Diego developed a new technology that uses an oscillating electric field to easily and quickly isolate drug-delivery nanoparticles from blood. The technology could serve as a general tool to separate and recover nanoparticles from other complex fluids for medical, environmental, and industrial applications.

Nanoparticles, which are generally one thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair, are difficult to separate from plasma, the liquid component of blood, due to their small size and low density. Traditional methods to remove nanoparticles from plasma samples typically involve diluting the plasma, adding a high concentration sugar solution to the plasma and spinning it in a centrifuge, or attaching a targeting agent to the surface of the nanoparticles. These methods either alter the normal behavior of the nanoparticles or cannot be applied to some of the most common nanoparticle types.

“This is the first example of isolating a wide range of nanoparticles out of plasma with a minimum amount of manipulation,” said Stuart Ibsen, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of NanoEngineering at UC San Diego and first author of the study published October in the journal Small. “We’ve designed a very versatile technique that can be used to recover nanoparticles in a lot of different processes.”

This new nanoparticle separation technology will enable researchers — particularly those who design and study drug-delivery nanoparticles for disease therapies — to better monitor what happens to nanoparticles circulating in a patient’s bloodstream. One of the questions that researchers face is how blood proteins bind to the surfaces of drug-delivery nanoparticles and make them less effective. Researchers could also use this technology in the clinic to determine if the blood chemistry of a particular patient is compatible with the surfaces of certain drug-delivery nanoparticles.

“We were interested in a fast and easy way to take these nanoparticles out of plasma so we could find out what’s going on at their surfaces and redesign them to work more effectively in blood,” said Michael Heller, a nanoengineering professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and senior author of the study.

The device used to isolate the drug-delivery nanoparticles was a dime-sized electric chip manufactured by La Jolla-based Biological Dynamics, which licensed the original technology from UC San Diego. The chip contains hundreds of tiny electrodes that generate a rapidly oscillating electric field that selectively pulls the nanoparticles out of a plasma sample. Researchers inserted a drop of plasma spiked with nanoparticles into the electric chip and demonstrated nanoparticle recovery within 7 minutes. The technology worked on different types of drug-delivery nanoparticles that are typically studied in various labs.

The breakthrough in the technology relies on designing a chip that can work in the high salt concentration of blood plasma. The chip’s ability to pull the nanoparticles out of plasma is based on differences in the material properties between the nanoparticles and plasma components. When the chip’s electrodes apply an oscillating electric field, the positive and negative charges inside the nanoparticles reorient themselves at a different speed than the charges in the surrounding plasma. This momentary imbalance in the charges creates an attractive force between the nanoparticles and the electrodes. As the electric field oscillates, the nanoparticles are continually pulled towards the electrodes, leaving the rest of the plasma behind. Also, the electric field is designed to oscillate at just the right frequency: 15,000 times per second.

“It’s amazing that this method works without any modifications to the plasma samples or to the nanoparticles,” said Ibsen.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Recovery of Drug Delivery Nanoparticles from Human Plasma Using an Electrokinetic Platform Technology by Stuart Ibsen, Avery Sonnenberg, Carolyn Schutt, Rajesh Mukthavaram, Yasan Yeh, Inanc Ortac, Sareh Manouchehri, Santosh Kesari, Sadik Esener, and Michael J. Heller. Small Volume 11, Issue 38, pages 5088–5096, October 14, 2015 DOI: 10.1002/smll.201500892 Article first published online: 14 AUG 2015

© 2015 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

That’s quite a gap between the publication date and promotion of the study. Presumably this is the second time around for the promotion efforts. In any event, the paper is behind a paywall.

Afrofuturism in the UK’s Guardian newspaper and as a Future Tense Dec. 2015 event

My introduction to the term, Afrofuturism was in a March 11, 2015 posting by Jessica Bland for the Guardian in the Technology/Political Science section. It was written on the occasion of a then upcoming FutureFest event,

This is unapologetically connected to FutureFest, the festival Nesta (where I work) is holding this weekend in London Bridge. These thoughts represent the ideas that piqued my interest while curating talks and exhibits based on the thought experiment of a future African city-superpower. George Clinton, Spoek Mathambo, Tegan Bristow and Fabian-Carlos Guhl (from Ampion Venture Bus) will be speaking during the weekend. Thomas Aquilina is displaying photographs from his trip and the architects of the Lagos 2060 project will take part in a debate on whether their fiction can lead to a different kind of future.

In anticipation of the March 2015 FutureFest event, Bland had  written a roundup piece about “New sounds from South Africa and Nigeria’s urban science fiction [that] could change the future of technology and the city.” Here are some excerpts from her piece (Note: Links have been removed),

Strong stories or visions of the future stick around. The 1920s sci-fi fantasy of a jetpack commute still pops up in discussions about the future of technology, not to mention as an option on the Citymapper travel app. By co-opting or creating new visions of the future, it seems possible to influence the development of new products and services – from consumer tech to urban infrastructure. A new generation of African artists is taking over the mantle of Afrofuturist arts from a US-centred crowd. They could bring a welcome change to how technology is developed in the region, as well as a challenge to the dominance of imported plans for urban development.

Last Thursday’s London gig from Fantasma was sweaty and boisterous. It was also very different from the remix of Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control that brought front man Spoek Mathambo to the attention of a global audience a couple of years ago. Fantasma is a group of South African musicians with different backgrounds. Guitarist Bhekisenzo Cele started the gig with three of his own songs, introducing the traditional Zulu maskandi music that they went on to mix with shangaan electro, hiphop, punk, electronica and everything in between.

The gig had a buzz about it. But the performance was from a new collective trying things out; it wasn’t as genre-smashing as expected. And expectations ride high for Spoek. In 2011, he titled a collection from his back catalogue ‘Beyond Afrofuturism’. He took on, at least in name, a whole Afro-American cultural movement: embodied by musicians like Sun Ra, George Clinton and Drexciya. A previous post on this blog by Chardine Taylor-Stone describes the roots of Afrofuturism in science fiction that centres on space travel and human enhancement. But she goes on to say: “Afrofuturism also goes beyond spaceships, androids and aliens, and encompasses African mythology and cosmology with an aim to connect those from across the Black Diaspora to their forgotten African ancestry.” Spoek shares what he calls a cultural lineage with this movement. But he is not Afro-American. He also shares a cultural lineage with the sounds of South African musicians he grew up listening to.

Other forms of art are taking an increasingly activist role in the future of technology. Lydia Nicholas’s description of the relationship between Douglas Adam’s fictional Hitchhiker’s Guide and the real life development of the iPad shows how science fiction can effortlessly influence the development of new technology.

The science fiction collection Lagos 2060 is a more purposeful intervention. Published in 2013, it speculates about what it will be like to live in Lagos 100 years after Nigeria gained independence from the UK. It was born out of a creative writing workshop initiated by DADA books in Lagos. Foundation director of DADA, Ayodele Arigbabu, described the collection and other similar video and visual art work (in an email): “Far more than aesthetic indulgence, these renditions are a calibration of the changes deemed necessary in today’s political, technical and cultural infrastructure.”

Bland also explores a history of this movement,

Gaston Berger was the Senegalese founder of the academic journal Prospectiv in 1957. To many, he was the first futurist, or at least one of the first people to describe themselves as one. He founded promotes the practice of playing out the human consequences of today’s action. This is about avoiding a fatalistic approach to the future: about being proactive and provoking change, as much as anticipating it.

Berger’s early work spawned a generation, and then another and another, of professional futurists. They work in different ways and different places. Some are in government, enticing and frightening politicians with the prospect of a different transport system, healthcare sector or national security regime. Some are consultants to large companies, offering advice on the way that trends like 3D printing or flying robots will change their sector. An article from 1996 does a good job of summarising the principles of this movement: don’t act like an ostrich and ignore the future by putting your head in the sand; don’t act like a fireman and just respond to threats to your future; and don’t focus just on insurance against for the future.

Bland has written an interesting and sprawling piece, which in some way reflects the subject. Africa is a huge and sprawling continent.

Slate, a US online magazine, is hosting along with New America and Arizona State University a Future Tense event on Afrofuturism but this seems to be quite US-centric. From the Future Tense Afrofuturism event webpage on the Slate website (Note: Links have been removed),

Future Tense is hosting a conversation about Afrofuturism in New York City on December 3rd, 2015 from 6:30-8:30 p.m.

Afrofuturism emphasizes the intersection of black cultures with questions of imagination, liberation, and technology. Rooted in works like those of science fiction author Octavia Butler, avant-garde jazz legend Sun Ra, and George Clinton, Afrofuturism explores concepts of race, space and time in order to ask the existential question posed by critic Mark Dery: “Can a community whose past has been deliberately erased imagine possible futures?”

Will the alternative futures and realities Afrofuturism describes transform and reshape the concept of black identity? Join Future Tense for a discussion on Afrofuturism and its unique vantage on the challenges faced by black Americans and others throughout the African diaspora.

During the event, enjoy an Afrofuturist inspired drink from 67 Orange Street. Follow the discussion online using #Afrofuturism and by following @NewAmericaNYC and @FutureTenseNow.

Click here to RSVP. Space is limited so register now!

PARTICIPANTS

Michael Bennett
Principal Investigator, School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University
@MGBennett

Ytasha Womack
Author, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture and Post Black: How A New Generation is Redefining African American Identity
@ytashawomack

Juliana Huxtable
DJ and Artist
@HUXTABLEJULIANA

Walé Oyéjidé
Designer and Creative Director, Ikire Jones
@IkireJones

Aisha Harris
Staff writer, Slate
@craftingmystyle

It seems we have one word, Afrofuturism, and two definitions. One where Africa is referenced and one where African-American experience is referenced.

For anyone curious about Nesta, where Jessica Bland works and the Future Fest host (from its Wikipedia entry),

Nesta (formerly NESTA, National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) is an independent charity that works to increase the innovation capacity of the UK.

The organisation acts through a combination of practical programmes, investment, policy and research, and the formation of partnerships to promote innovation across a broad range of sectors.

That’s it for now.

Science communication: clarity and dumbing down

The older and less polite term for this activity is ‘dumbing down’.  But, if I read Hamideh Emrani’s Nov. 20, 2015 post for the Signals blog (insiders’ perspective on the world of stem cells and regenerative medicine; [Canada] Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine website) and understand the video clip (embedded in Emrani’s post) featuring Alan Alda (actor and science afficionado and communicator) rightly, the word ‘clarity’ is now being used. I’m glad to see the change.

As Emrani hints in her Nov. 20, 2015 post , it’s very difficult to gauge your audience’s interest level and knowledge about a topic,

I completely understand the challenge for a scientist to not use scientific language and not assume what they know is common knowledge. I still find myself adding jargon to my writing. But we all know the importance of keeping the audience engaged and the old saying: “practice makes perfect.”

Her comments were made in the context of a recent conference she had attended and observations she’d made about the presentations.

In the interest of not repeating Emrani’s post, I’m going to focus on some different aspects of science communication and audiences. In all the talk about science communication, there’s very little about communicating to audiences who do have some or lot of science education. So, here goes. Trying to judge your audience’s knowledge level can be tricky assuming you’re not at a specialized conference where you’d expect people to have the basics. Even an audience full of scientists can be tricky, if they have different specialties.

For example, some years ago I was told that a job for a technical writer was being opened up at TRIUMF, Canada’s National Laboratory for  Particle and Nuclear Physics. According to my information, they wanted a technical writer not to write manuals but to create a situation where TRIUMF’s scientists from various specialties would be forced to explain their work to someone who wasn’t a specialist. Apparently, these TRIUMF experts weren’t able to read each other’s written materials or (presumably) understand their presentations due to an overabundance of expertise and jargon on the part of the writer/presenter and a reluctance to admit to difficulties with understanding on the part of the differently expert reader/listener.

Of course, it’s all possible to aim too low. Years ago I was working in a local health department and learned this about an AIDS educator who’d been hired for her expertise to assist health professionals (mostly nurses) in their work with AIDS patients.

Shortly after starting with the health department, she gave a 2-day workshop and made a disastrous choice. The nurses had been dealing with AIDS patients for a few years and she gave a workshop designed for people who knew absolutely nothing about the disease thereby insulting the nurses’ expertise. Realizing her error on the first day, she recalibrated her workshop for the second.  (BTW, It’s very hard to do that to a presentation partway through.) Unfortunately, a chunk of her audience had left. Worse yet, I heard the story more than a year later in the context of an explanation of why a number of nurses were shunning her professionally.

Getting back to clarity, here’s Alan Alda,

As Emrani notes, practice helps. If you have time, don’t forget to check out her where she has more to say and another embedded video.

Quo Vadis (where are you going) Nanomedicine (journal) special issues

There are two issues, part one and part two, of the journal Nanomedicine asking the question: Where are you going? or Quo Vadis, if prefer the Latin. A Nov. 21, 2015 news item on Nanotechnology Now announces the special issues,

Nanomedicine, a leading MEDLINE-indexed journal, has published a special focus issue highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of this emerging field, which explores the medical application of nanotechnology to monitor, repair, and control human biological systems at the molecular level. Nanomedicine is published by Future Science Group.

A Nov. 20, 2015 Future Science Group press release on EurekAlert provides more detail,

“This special issue brings the different actors of nanomedicine closer together and encourages scientists to better understand the work of others who perform outside their own comfort zone,” said Michael Schillmeier, who co-guest-edited the two-volume issue with Robert Luxenhofer and Matthias Barz. “With a rather unique assemblage of input and opinion from scientists, philosophers, clinicians and social scientists, it is the beginning of an experiment in itself to rethink nanomedicine in the making.”

Contributing authors to the issue address the historical trajectory of the field, current debates, and future perspectives on nanomedical research. The articles position nanomedicine as not just a biological, chemical, and physical issue, but also a social issue. Of particular note, the articles bring together natural scientists, social scientists, clinicians and philosophers to both critically discuss and also engage with the creation of novel practices, concepts, methods, models and metaphors in nanomedicine. The authors also address the medical and regulatory needs of current nanomedical research and its possible future.

“Over the last decade, nanomedicine has become a field of innovative research and is now seen as having the potential to overcome many of the shortcomings of current disease treatment strategies. However, these exciting scientific advances have been accompanied by a number of issues which touch on the social, ethical and safety aspects of nanomedicine,” said Jonathan Wilkinson, Commissioning Editor of Nanomedicine. “This special issue seeks to address this, bringing together carefully selected experts from around the world who discuss the past, present and future of nanomedicine from a range of perspectives. We hope that the readers of the journal find the topics and viewpoints presented in the articles as interesting and thought-provoking as we have.”

The issues can be found here,

Special Focus Issue Part 1: Quo vadis nanomedicine: past, present and future of nanomedicine

Special Focus Issue Part 2: Quo vadis nanomedicine: past, present and future of nanomedicine

They feature a mix of papers that are open access or behind a paywall.

Here’s the introduction to the two issues (Note: Links have been removed),

As witnessed over the decade, ‘nanomedicine’ assembles diverse research agendas and practices, which aim to improve medical technologies, applications and practices. Clearly though, many promising concepts in the field of nanomedicine have a much longer tradition and link different fields of the life sciences and beyond. For instance Paul Ehrlich’s idea of the ‘magic bullet’ goes back to 1906 and still plays a role in conceptualizing and designing nanomedicine at the beginning of the 21st century. Irrespectively, if the ‘magic bullet’ will become a medical reality in the future or not, nanomedical research shows that novel ideas not only face a myriad of unsolved problems and unknowns, but also create scientific challenges and alter scientific practices. Moreover, since nanomedical research aims to innovating healthcare systems it requires a close participatory network of science, technology and society to address and engage with the issues posed by nanoscaled biomedical research.

The key argument of this two-volume special issue is that nanomedicine is as much a social issue as it is a biological, chemical, physical and so forth. With such a framework, this special issue contributes to a new era in the life sciences. The two-volume special issue addresses significant trajectories of the history, current debates and future perspectives of nanomedical research. It brings together natural scientists, social scientists, clinicians and philosophers to critically discuss but also engage with the creation of novel practices, concepts, methods, models and metaphors in nanomedicine. Authors also address the medical and regulatory needs in current nanomedical research and its possible futures.

Sociologist, philosopher and STS-scholar Michael Schillmeier argues that it is time to make nanomedicine public and protect nanomedicine from an excessive and often counter-productive ‘culture of promise’ of nanoscience and nanotechnology. He suggests to link three experimental ways of engaging with issues in life science and nanomedicine to improve current scientific practices: laboratory experiment and scientific analysis, public expert controversies, and publics [1].

Weitze and Heckl take on the issue of how science is communicated to the public. One particular problem may be that scientific results are being presented to the public, but the process of getting there often remains a black box for the interested public and even scientists from other fields [2]. Such practice disregards the importance of how facts are constructed. By contrast, in the ‘Open Nano Lab’ at the ‘Deutsche Museum’ in Munich, a research lab is out in the open and under scrutiny of the public.

Matthias Barz points out that simplifications in the complex task of developing nanomedicines are necessary to enable multidisciplinary research [3]. Scientists, however, need to be aware that current research strategies are prone to oversimplification or overgeneralization leading to unfavorable decisions in the developmental process itself.

Sociologist and STS-scholar Ghazal PourGashtasbi focuses on the processes of translation in nanomedical research practices and toxicology [4]. PourGashtasbi contributes to a context- and object-centered research agenda in Science and Technology Studies (STS). In particular, she addresses how nano-specific issues in medical research are exacerbated by uncertainty and unpredictability.

Robert Luxenhofer discusses variability and reproducibility in the process of synthesizing and characterizing polymers and nanomedicines [5]. Surprisingly, the issue of reproducibility, which is an undisputed necessity in life sciences, seems to be underappreciated in the first stages of nanomedicine development.

Philosopher and STS-scholar Xavier Guchet discusses the polysemic character of personalized medicine and nanomedicine [6]. He outlines rival epistemic and technological choices in research programs and argues that techno-epistemic plurality echoes conflicting expectations and values among today’s biomedicine actors.

Lamprecht tackles current issues of in vitro and in vivo characterization of nanomedicines [7]. Their works provide a critical overview on characterization methods available for nanomedicines and point out their specific limitations. By contrast, Baldelli-Bombelli and co-authors elaborate the influence of the protein corona on nanomedicines [8]. They outline past and present as well as possible future options of research on proteins and the absorption on different kinds of nanoparticles and related effects.

In his editorial the sociologist Nils Kubischok critically discusses the importance of past and present visions in nanomedical research [9]. The philosopher and STS-scholar Sacha Loeve discusses the historical roots and persistence of ‘war’-metaphors in current understandings of malign biomedical processes and related ways of nanomedical treatment [10]. Loeve also points out that novel metaphors beyond ‘war’ like that of the ‘oïkos:’ become powerful in understanding the social relevance of the nanobiomedical. Robin Pierce discusses the changes and potentialities of novel ‘therapeutic windows’ in translational nanomedicine [11]. Her paper analyzes three aspects of the therapeutic window in nanomedicine – temporal, spatial, and manner of construction in terms of the dimensions of modern medicine.

Diane Bowman and Jake Gatof outline the regulatory barriers for nanomedicine and emerging global questions and challenges of regulation [12]. They explore both existing and suggested frameworks that aim to deal with the regulation of emerging technologies and outline priority areas for action and general conclusions specific to nanomedicine. Jain’s editorial touches upon the issues of safety and ethics as well as personalized medicine [13].

While the majority of research in the field of nanomedicine addresses the therapy of cancer, Almeida [14], Owen and Rannard [15] as well as Zentel and Lehr [16] provide overviews on other unmet medical needs which may be tackled by nanomedical research. Antonio Almeida and co-authors describe the urgent medical need for nanoparticle platforms targeting bone infections, which are a severe problem in wound healing [14]. The authors expect that nanomedicines will provide new tools in the therapy of bone infections by providing an improved antibacterial and antibiofilm activity. Rudolf Zentel, Claus-Michael Lehr and co-authors also highlight the possible use of nanomedicines in the therapy of bacterial infections, but also describe concepts for nanoparticle-based tumor immune therapies [16]. In both approaches it is hoped that the intrinsic properties of nanomedicines can improve the therapeutic outcome. Andrew Owen and Steven Rannard on solid drug nanoparticles as a technology discuss a significantly different idea of drug delivery systems [15]. They also highlight special considerations for the treatment of chronic diseases such as HIV.

Clearly, though, cancer therapy remains a mainstay in nanomedicine research. Meiners and Bölükbas [17], as well as Christoph Alexiou [18] and co-authors provide comprehensive overviews on cancer nanomedicines. While Bölükbas and Meiners describe concepts for nanoparticle-mediated drug delivery for the therapy of lung cancer, Alexiou and co-authors outline the concept of magnetic field-guided drug delivery to solid tumors.

We hope that this special issue may help to bring the different actors of nanomedicine closer together and encourage scientists to better understand other actors which act outside their own comfort zone. We believe this special issue is rather unique in assembling scientists, philosophers, clinicians and social scientists. As such, it is the beginning of an experiment in itself to rethink nanomedicine in the making.
Financial & competing interests disclosure

Financial support for M Barz by the German Research Council (SFB 1066), CINEMA and the NMFZ Mainz is gratefully acknowledged. Financial support for R Luxenhofer through start-up funding by the Julius-Maximilians Universität Würzburg and the German Plastics Center SKZ is gratefully acknowledged. The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.

Happy reading!

James Clerk Maxwell and his science mashup unified theories of magnetism, electricity, and optics

It’s the 150th anniversary for a series of equations electric charges and electric and magnetic fields that are still being explored. Jon Butterworth in a Nov. 22, 2015 posting on the Guardian science blog network explains (Note: A link has been removed),

The chances are that you are reading this article on some kind of electronic technology. You are definitely seeing it via visible light, unless you have a braille or audio converter. And it probably got to you via wifi or a mobile phone signal. All of those things are understood in terms of the relationships between electric charges and electric and magnetic fields summarised in Maxwell’s [James Clerk Maxwell] equations, published by the Royal Society in 1865, 150 years ago.

Verbally, the equations can be summarised as something like:

Electric and magnetic fields make electric charges move. Electric charges cause electric fields, but there are no magnetic charges. Changes in magnetic fields cause electric fields, and vice versa.

The equations specify precisely how it all happens, but that is the gist of it.

Butterworth got a rare opportunity to see the original manuscript,

 Original manuscript of Maxwell’s seminal paper Photograph: Jon Butterworth/Royal Society [downloaded from http://www.theguardian.com/science/life-and-physics/2015/nov/22/maxwells-equations-150-years-of-light]

Original manuscript of Maxwell’s seminal paper Photograph: Jon Butterworth/Royal Society [downloaded from http://www.theguardian.com/science/life-and-physics/2015/nov/22/maxwells-equations-150-years-of-light]

I love this description from Butterworth,

It was submitted in 1864 but, in a situation familiar to scientists everywhere, was held up in peer review. There’s a letter, dated March 1865, from William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) saying he was sorry for being slow, that he’d read most of it and it seemed pretty good (“decidely suitable for publication”).

Then, there’s this,

The equations seem to have been very much a bottom-up affair, in that Maxwell collected together a number of known laws which were used to describe various experimental results, and (with a little extra ingredient of his own) fitted them into a unified framework. What is amazing is how much that framework then reveals, both in terms of deep physical principles, and rich physical phenomena.

I’m not excerpting any part of Butterworth’s description of how Maxwell fit these equations together for his unification theory as I think it should be read in its totality.

The section on quantum mechanics is surprising,

Now, one thing Maxwell’s equations don’t contain is quantum mechanics [emphasis mine]. They are classical equations. But if you take the quantum mechnical description of an electron, and you enforce the same charge conservation law/voltage symmetry that was contained in the classical Maxwell’s equations, something marvellous happens [emphasis mine]. The symmetry is denoted “U(1)”, and if you enforce it locally – that it, you say that you have to be allowed make different U(1) type changes to electrons at different points in space, you actually generate the quantum mechanical version of Maxwell’s equations out of nowhere [emphasis mine]. You produce the equations that describe the photon, and the whole of quantum electrodynamics.

I encourage you to read Butterworth’s Nov. 22, 2015 posting where he also mention two related art/science projects and has embedded a video animation of the principles discussed in his posting.

For anyone unfamiliar with Butterworth, there’s this description at the Guardian,

Jon Butterworth is a physics professor at University College London. He is a member of the UCL High Energy Physics group and works on the Atlas experiment at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider. His book Smashing Physics: The Inside Story of the Hunt for the Higgs was published in May 2014

International centre for testing graphene opens in China

An international graphene measurement centre opened in Oct. 2015 but the official launch seems to have just started. A Nov. 23, 2015 news item on Nanowerk makes the announcement,

The China-UK collaborative effort to support the development an international graphene standards and testing centre was officially launched at Zhongguancun Fengtai Science Park, Beijing, China, in October 2015. As the demand for international standards for testing graphene increases, the Centre in Beijing will lay the foundation for the development of graphene industry and high-end applications in China.

A Nov. 23, 2015 UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL) press release, which originated the news item, describes the October 2015 launch in more detail,

A China-UK graphene conference was held as part of the launch activities on the 24 October 2015 and graphene experts from China and the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) discussed graphene R&D progress and the development of graphene international standards; the discussions included NPL’s work in this area and the related testing methods.

The graphene conference was part of a programme of activities between NPL, Beijing Zhongguancun Fengtai Science Park and the associated Beijing Fengtai New Materials Inspection Institute (BFM) agreed in a Memorandum of Understanding signed in Spring 2015, to support the development of standards and testing in China. Efforts are being made to promote the implementation of standards in China and to introduce new methods of measurement by establishing non-contact and contact-type testing facilities for electrical and structural properties of graphene and other 2D materials at the centre. During the conference, the Chinese Association for Promoting Cooperation between Universities and Industries agreed a strategic cooperation for the centre, which will enable the integration and utilisation of the resources of universities and research institutes. This will lead to knowledge transfer and dissemination of testing standards for the establishment of China’s graphene characterisation platform and applications platform.

The Vice Mayor of Fengtai District, and Fengtai Park director, Jie Zhang (张婕), said that the Zhongguancun Fengtai Park is now actively building an international graphene centre, and that the cooperation of NPL and other international research teams will be instrumental to the success of the centre. NPL’s Principal Research Scientist, Ling Hao (郝玲), added that the partnership with Fengtai Science Park, BFM and other Chinese organisations will be “a win-win collaboration” for graphene research, development and application for both the UK and China.

Executive Chairman of the China Industry-University-Research Institute Collaboration Association (CIUR) Prof Wang Jianhua (王建华) said that graphene international standards and testing is key to national development of a graphene industry. He continued that the China-UK conference will further promote cooperation in graphene research, strengthening resource integration in graphene certification through testing and standards, all will contribute to these exciting R&D developments.

Stephanie Kitchen, Andrew Pollard, Tim Prior and Ling Hao of NPL also made presentations at the China-UK conference and delegates from China National Institute of Standardization, Beijing Institute of Metrology, Beijing Institute of Technology gave presentations and many other research and development institutions attended this conference.

The Brits have been amazing where graphene is concerned. They have been tireless about promoting it and themselves as leaders in the field and this is one more notch on their belt. Just prior to the Graphene Flagship winning one of two places (in 2013) for 1B Euros in research funding over 10 years, I wrote a series of posts (Feb. 2, 2012 starts the series, followed by Feb. 6, 2012, and then there was Feb. 21, 2012) where I expressed my admiration for the Brits’ stellar efforts.

Hot off the email: Member of Parliament Kennedy Stewart and legislating protection for Canadian science

After narrowly winning his seat in the Oct. 19, 2015 election, Kennedy Stewart is busy back at work as science critic/shadow minister for the NDP (New Democratic Party). Today (Nov. 26, 2015), he made this announcement at the 2015 Canadian Science Policy Conference (Nov. 25 – 27), from the Nov. 26, 2015 email,

NDP will re-table legislation to give public science a stronger voice in government

OTTAWA – During the Canadian Science Policy Conference, NDP Science Critic Kennedy Stewart called on the new Liberal government to enshrine scientific freedom into law and announced the opposition’s concrete proposals to defend evidence-based policy.

“After years of muzzling, mismanagement, and misuse of research by the Conservatives, our scientists need lasting protections in order to finally turn the page on the lost Harper decade,” said Dr. Stewart, an Associate Professor on leave from Simon Fraser University’s School of Public Policy. “The new Minister for Science should get to work drafting ethics legislation that unequivocally ensures the open communication of scientific research throughout government.”

MP Stewart will re-table two key science proposals when Parliament returns in December.

“Canada needs a new science advisor that is independent of the government and reports directly to Parliament,” continued Dr. Stewart. “Their mandate needs to be comprehensive and protected by law – like the NDP’s proposal for a Parliamentary Science Officer.”

I have written about Kennedy Stewart and his reproposed Parliamentary Science Officer legislation previously in a Dec. 1, 2014 posting which provides more information on how that position differs from the Chief Science Officer position to be filled shortly if I’ve understood the priorities in Kirsty Duncan’s Minister of Science mandate letter properly (Nov. 17, 2015 posting) but the reproposed scientific integrity legislation is new to me.

A view to controversies about nanoparticle drug delivery, sticky-flares, and a PNAS surprise

Despite all the excitement and claims for nanoparticles as vehicles for drug delivery to ‘sick’ cells there is at least one substantive problem, the drug-laden nanoparticles don’t actually enter the interior of the cell. They are held in a kind of cellular ‘waiting room’.

Leonid Schneider in a Nov. 20, 2015 posting on his For Better Science blog describes the process in more detail,

A large body of scientific nanotechnology literature is dedicated to the biomedical aspect of nanoparticle delivery into cells and tissues. The functionalization of the nanoparticle surface is designed to insure their specificity at targeting only a certain type of cells, such as cancers cells. Other technological approaches aim at the cargo design, in order to ensure the targeted release of various biologically active agents: small pharmacological substances, peptides or entire enzymes, or nucleotides such as regulatory small RNAs or even genes. There is however a main limitation to this approach: though cells do readily take up nanoparticles through specific membrane-bound receptor interaction (endocytosis) or randomly (pinocytosis), these nanoparticles hardly ever truly reach the inside of the cell, namely its nucleocytoplasmic space. Solid nanoparticles are namely continuously surrounded by the very same membrane barrier they first interacted with when entering the cell. These outer-cell membrane compartments mature into endosomal and then lysosomal vesicles, where their cargo is subjected to low pH and enzymatic digestion. The nanoparticles, though seemingly inside the cell, remain actually outside. …

What follows is a stellar piece featuring counterclaims about and including Schneider’s own journalistic research into scientific claims that the problem of gaining entry to a cell’s true interior has been addressed by technologies developed in two different labs.

Having featured one of the technologies here in a July 24, 2015 posting titled: Sticky-flares nanotechnology to track and observe RNA (ribonucleic acid) regulation and having been contacted a couple of times by one of the scientists, Raphaël Lévy from the University of Liverpool (UK), challenging the claims made (Lévy’s responses can be found in the comments section of the July 2015 posting), I thought a followup of sorts was in order.

Scientific debates (then and now)

Scientific debates and controversies are part and parcel of the scientific process and what most outsiders, such as myself, don’t realize is how fraught it is. For a good example from the past, there’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (from its Wikipedia entry), Note: Links have been removed),

Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (published 1985) is a book by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer. It examines the debate between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes over Boyle’s air-pump experiments in the 1660s.

The style seems more genteel than what a contemporary Canadian or US audience is accustomed to but Hobbes and Boyle (and proponents of both sides) engaged in bruising communication.

There was a lot at stake then and now. It’s not just the power, prestige, and money, as powerfully motivating as they are, it’s the research itself. Scientists work for years to achieve breakthroughs or to add more to our common store of knowledge. It’s painstaking and if you work at something for a long time, you tend to be invested in it. Saying you’ve wasted ten years of your life looking at the problem the wrong way or have misunderstood your data is not easy.

As for the current debate, Schneider’s description gives no indication that there is rancour between any of the parties but it does provide a fascinating view of two scientists challenging one of the US’s nanomedicine rockstars, Chad Mirkin. The following excerpt follows the latest technical breakthroughs to the interior portion of the cell through three phases of the naming conventions (Nano-Flares, also known by its trade name, SmartFlares, which is a precursor technology to Sticky-Flares), Note: Links have been removed,

The next family of allegedly nucleocytoplasmic nanoparticles which Lévy turned his attention to, was that of the so called “spherical nucleic acids”, developed in the lab of Chad Mirkin, multiple professor and director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology at the Northwestern University, USA. These so called “Nano-Flares” are gold nanoparticles, functionalized with fluorophore-coupled oligonucleotides matching the messenger RNA (mRNA) of interest (Prigodich et al., ACS Nano 3:2147-2152, 2009; Seferos et al., J Am. Chem.Soc. 129:15477-15479, 2007). The mRNA detection method is such that the fluorescence is initially quenched by the gold nanoparticle proximity. Yet when the oligonucleotide is displaced by the specific binding of the mRNA molecules present inside the cell, the fluorescence becomes detectable and serves thus as quantitative read-out for the intracellular mRNA abundance. Exactly this is where concerns arise. To find and bind mRNA, spherical nucleic acids must leave the endosomal compartments. Is there any evidence that Nano-Flares ever achieve this and reach intact the nucleocytoplasmatic space, where their target mRNA is?

Lévy’s lab has focused its research on the commercially available analogue of the Nano-Flares, based on the patent to Mirkin and Northwestern University and sold by Merck Millipore under the trade name of SmartFlares. These were described by Mirkin as “a powerful and prolific tool in biology and medical diagnostics, with ∼ 1,600 unique forms commercially available today”. The work, led by Lévy’s postdoctoral scientist David Mason, now available in post-publication process at ScienceOpen and on Figshare, found no experimental evidence for SmartFlares to be ever found outside the endosomal membrane vesicles. On the contrary, the analysis by several complementary approaches, i.e., electron, fluorescence and photothermal microscopy, revealed that the probes are retained exclusively within the endosomal compartments.

In fact, even Merck Millipore was apparently well aware of this problem when the product was developed for the market. As I learned, Merck performed a number of assays to address the specificity issue. Multiple hundred-fold induction of mRNA by biological cell stimulation (confirmed by quantitative RT-PCR) led to no significant changes in the corresponding SmartFlare signal. Similarly, biological gene downregulation or experimental siRNA knock-down had no effect on the corresponding SmartFlare fluorescence. Cell lines confirmed as negative for a certain biomarker proved highly positive in a SmartFlare assay.  Live cell imaging showed the SmartFlare signal to be almost entirely mitochondrial, inconsistent with reported patterns of the respective mRNA distributions.  Elsewhere however, cyanine dye-labelled oligonucleotides were found to unspecifically localise to mitochondria   (Orio et al., J. RNAi Gene Silencing 9:479-485, 2013), which might account to the often observed punctate Smart Flare signal.

More recently, Mirkin lab has developed a novel version of spherical nucleic acids, named Sticky-Flares (Briley et al., PNAS 112:9591-9595, 2015), which has also been patented for commercial use. The claim is that “the Sticky-flare is capable of entering live cells without the need for transfection agents and recognizing target RNA transcripts in a sequence-specific manner”. To confirm this, Lévy used the same approach as for the striped nanoparticles [not excerpted here]: he approached Mirkin by email and in person, requesting the original microscopy data from this publication. As Mirkin appeared reluctant, Lévy invoked the rules for data sharing by the journal PNAS, the funder NSF as well as the Northwestern University. After finally receiving Mirkin’s thin-optical microscopy data by air mail, Lévy and Mason re-analyzed it and determined the absence of any evidence for endosomal escape, while all Sticky-Flare particles appeared to be localized exclusively inside vesicular membrane compartments, i.e., endosomes (Mason & Levy, bioRxiv 2015).

I encourage you to read Schneider’s Nov. 20, 2015 posting in its entirety as these excerpts can’t do justice to it.

The PNAS surprise

PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science) published one of Mirkin’s papers on ‘Sticky-flares’ and is where scientists, Raphaël Lévy and David Mason, submitted a letter outlining their concerns with the ‘Sticky-flares’ research. Here’s the response as reproduced in Lévy’s Nov. 16, 2015 posting on his Rapha-Z-Lab blog

Dear Dr. Levy,

I regret to inform you that the PNAS Editorial Board has declined to publish your Letter to the Editor. After careful consideration, the Board has decided that your letter does not contribute significantly to the discussion of this paper.

Thank you for submitting your comments to PNAS.

Sincerely yours,
Inder Verma
Editor-in-Chief

Judge for yourself, Lévy’s and Mason’s letter can be found here (pdf) and here.

Conclusions

My primary interest in this story is in the view it provides of the scientific process and the importance of and difficulty associated with the debates.

I can’t venture an opinion about the research or the counterarguments other than to say that Lévy’s and Mason’s thoughtful challenge bears more examination than PNAS is inclined to accord. If their conclusions or Chad Mirkin’s are wrong, let that be determined in an open process.

I’ll leave the very last comment to Schneider who is both writer and cartoonist, from his Nov. 20, 2015 posting,

LeonidSchneiderImagination

Survey of Canadian science blog readers

Science Borealis, which is a Canadian science blog aggregator (an online location where you can find approximately 100 Canadian science blogs), is surveying blog readers in partnership with Dr. Paige Jarreau; further down this posting, I’m extending their invitation to participate *(deadline: Dec. 14, 2015)* but first a few details about Dr. Jarreau and the research.

About Dr. Paige Jareau

It seems she’s a photographer, as well as, a researcher,

Macro image of the eye of an endangered California Desert Tortoise, Gopherus agassizii. Credit: Paige Jarreau

Macro image of the eye of an endangered California Desert Tortoise, Gopherus agassizii. Credit: Paige Jarreau

You can find more of her photographs here.

Jarreau doesn’t seem to have updated her profiles in a while but here are two (one from her blog From the Lab Bench on the SciLogs.com blogging network and one from her academic webpage,

I am a Bio/Nanotechnology scientist turned journalist, with an M.S. in Biological & Agricultural Engineering. Science is my interest, but writing is my passion. I translate science into story, and my dream is to inspire a love for science in every reader. I am also a new PhD student at the LSU Manship School of Mass Communications, focusing in science communications and policy. I currently conduct research on the communication of science—specifically climate science—to various publics, and I write about all things science on a daily basis. Please feel free to ask me questions anytime, and follow me on Twitter @FromTheLabBench.

I’m always ready for a challenge, and I live to be inspired by science.

I will earn my PhD in Mass Communication from Louisiana State University in May 2015, and will soon be a post-doctoral researcher at the Manship School of Mass Communication, LSU (Fall 2015-Spring 2016). I currently study communication practices at the intersection of science communication and new media.

Her PhD dissertation is titled: All the Science That Is Fit to Blog: An Analysis of Science Blogging Practices and this is the portion of the abstract available for viewing,

This dissertation examines science blogging practices, including motivations, routines and content decision rules, across a wide range of science bloggers. Previous research has largely failed to investigate science blogging practices from science bloggers’ perspective or to establish a sociological framework for understa…

It seems that Jarreau has turned her attention to science blog readers for her latest research.

Jarreau’s research

Her latest work began with phase one in October 2015. Here’s the announcement from her Oct. 21, 2015 posting on From the Lab Bench (Scilogs.com), Note: A link has been removed,

Have you ever read one of these science blogs? Then head on over to fill out a readership survey for their blogs! We will learn much more about why people read science blogs, and you’ll get awesome prizes for participating, from science art to cash!

(Note – you have to completely fill out a readership survey for one of these blogs before taking the survey for another one of these blogs – but the survey will be shorter for the second blog you fill it out for!)

The survey closes on November 20th [2015] at midnight central US time!

In phase two, Jarreau has teamed up with Science Borealis, which started out as an aggregator for Canadian science blogs but has refashioned itself (from the Science Borealis About us page),

An inclusive digital science salon featuring Canadians blogging about a wide array of scientific disciplines. Science Borealis is a one-stop shop for the public, media, educators, and policy makers to source Canadian science information.

I wish they weren’t claiming to be “inclusive.” It’s too much like somebody introducing themselves as a “nice” or “kind” or … person. The truth is always the opposite.

Getting back to this latest phase of Jarreau’s research, approximately 20 Canadian science bloggers are participating through Science Borealis rather than the independent blog participation from phase one.

Extending the invitation

*From a Nov. 24, 2015 Science Borealis email,*

… Dr. Paige Jarreau from Louisiana State University and 20 other Canadian science bloggers [are conducting] a broad survey of Canadian science blog readers. Together we are trying to find out who reads science blogs in Canada, where they come from, whether Canadian-specific content is important to them and where they go for trustworthy, accurate science news and information. Your feedback will also help me learn more about my own blog readers.

It only take 5 minutes [I’d say more like 20 minutes as there’s more than one ‘essay’ question in addition to the questions where you tick off a box] to complete the survey. Begin here: http://bit.ly/ScienceBorealisSurvey

If you complete the survey you will be entered to win one of eleven prizes! A $50 Chapters Gift Card, a $20 surprise gift card, 3 Science Borealis T-shirts and 6 Surprise Gifts! PLUS everyone who completes the survey will receive a free hi-resolution science photograph from Paige’s Photography!

*(deadline for participating: Dec. 14, 2015)* You do have to read and ‘sign’ the consent form which provides a few more details about the research and outlines the privacy policy.

Having completed the survey, I do have a couple of comments. First, I’m delighted that this research is being conducted. I have stumbled across similar research some years ago but never had the chance to participate. (For anyone interested in previous research in this area),

Science, New Media, and the Public by Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele. Science 4 January 2013: Vol. 339 no. 6115 pp. 40-41 DOI: 10.1126/science.1232329

While the paper is behind a paywall, the link will take to you to the paper’s abstract and, more interestingly, a list of papers which have cited Brossard’s and Scheufele’s work.

Unfortunately, I found the survey a little confusing in that I was answering questions about Science Borealis  as if it were a blog but I use it as an aggregator. (I used the link from Science Borealis, I believe if you use the link from here you will be asked about FrogHeart first.) Science Borealis does have a blog which I don’t read often as it  represents a diversity of science interests and those don’t always coincide with mine.

Also, I was sorry to see the age demographic breakdowns which were fine for certain ages but started at the age of 15. While I realize it’s unlikely that I or my colleagues have many readers under the age of 15, it would be interesting to find out if there are any. As well, Vancouver’s Science World has a blog that’s on Science Borealis and chances are good that they might have child readers, assuming they might be participating. Moving to the other end of the spectrum, the last category was age 60 and up. We have an aging population in Canada and the United States and weirdly no one questions this huge category of 60 or 64 and up. It seems obvious to me but there’s a difference between being 60 and 75, which researchers will never find out because they don’t bother asking the question. It’s not just social science and marketing researchers, more worryingly, it includes medical researchers. Yes, all those research studies telling you a drug is safe almost always don’t apply to anyone over the age of 55.

Those comments aside, here again is the link to the survey,

 http://bit.ly/ScienceBorealisSurvey

Good Luck on winning a prize.

*’From a Nov. 24, 2015 Science Borealis email’ added on Nov. 25, 2015 at 1240 hours PDT.

*'(deadline for participating: Dec. 14, 2015)’ added Nov. 25, 2015 at 1535 hours PDT and changed from ‘Dec. 16, 2015’ to ‘Dec. 14, 2015’ on Dec. 14, 2015.

*Note: I have not been able to find a mention of if, when, and/or where the results of the survey will be disseminated or published. Added Nov. 25, 2015 at 1535 hours PDT.*

Omnidirectional fish camouflage and polarizing light

I find this camouflage technique quite interesting due to some nice writing, from a Nov. 19, 2015 Florida Atlantic University (FAU) news release on EurekAlert,

The vast open ocean presents an especially challenging environment for its inhabitants since there is nowhere for them to hide. Yet, nature has found a remarkable way for fish to hide from their predators using camouflage techniques. In a study published in the current issue of Science, researchers from Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University and collaborators show that fish scales have evolved to not only reflect light, but to also scramble polarization. They identified the tissue structure that fish evolved to do this, which could be an analog to develop new materials to help hide objects in the water.

HBOI researchers and colleagues collected more than 1,500 video-polarimetry measurements from live fish from distinct habitats under a variety of viewing conditions, and have revealed for the first time that fish have an ‘omnidirectional’ solution they use to camouflage themselves, demonstrating a new form of camouflage in nature — light polarization matching.

“We’ve known that open water fish have silvery scales for skin that reflect light from above so the reflected intensity is comparable to the background intensity when looking up, obliquely at the fish, as a predator would,” said Michael Twardowski, Ph.D., research professor at FAU’s HBOI and co-author of the study who collaborated with co-author James M. Sullivan, Ph.D., also a research professor at FAU’s HBOI. “This is one form of camouflage in the ocean.”

Typical light coloring on the ventral side (belly) and dark coloring on the dorsal (top) side of the fish also can help match intensity by differential absorption of light, in addition to reflection matching.

Light-scattering processes in the open ocean create spatially heterogeneous backgrounds. Polarization (the directional vibration of light waves) generates changes in the light environment that vary with the Sun’s position in the sky.

Polarization is a fundamental property of light, like color, but human eyes do not have the ability to sense it. Light travels in waves, and for natural sunlight, the direction of these waves is random around a central viewing axis. But when light reflects off a surface, waves parallel to that surface are dominant in the reflected beam. Many visual systems for fish have the ability to discriminate polarization, like built-in polarized sunglasses.

“Polarized sunglasses help you see better by blocking horizontal waves to reduce bright reflections,” said Twardowski. “The same principle helps fish discriminate objects better in water.”

Twardowski believes that even though light reflecting off silvery scales does a good job matching intensity of the background, if the scales acted as simple mirrors they would impart a polarization signature to the reflected light very different from the more random polarization of the background light field.

“This signature would be easily apparent to a predator with ability to discriminate polarization, resulting in poor camouflage,” he said. “Fish have evolved a solution to this potential vulnerability.”

To empirically determine whether open-ocean fish have evolved a cryptic reflectance strategy for their heterogeneous polarized environments, the researchers measured the contrasts of live open-ocean and coastal fish against the pelagic background in the Florida Keys and Curaçao. They used a single 360 degree camera around the horizontal plane of the targets and used both light microscopy and full-body video-polarimetry.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), publisher of Science magazine where the researchers’ study can be found issued a Nov. 19, 2015 news release on EurekAlert further describing the work,

… The study’s insights could pave the way to improvements in materials like polarization-sensitive satellites. Underwater, light vibrates in way that “polarizes” it. While humans cannot detect this vibrational state of light without technology, it is becoming increasingly evident that many species of fish can; lab-based studies hint that some fish have even adapted ways to use polarization to their advantage, including developing platelets within their skin that reflect and manipulate polarized light so the fish are camouflaged. To gain more insights into this form of camouflage, Parrish Brady and colleagues measured the polarization abilities of live fish as they swam in the open ocean. Using a specialized underwater camera (…), the researchers took numerous polarization measurements of several open water and coastal species of fish throughout the day as the sun changed position in the sky, causing subsequent changes in the polarization of light underwater. They found that open water fish from the Carangidae fish family, such as lookdowns and bigeye scad, exhibited significantly lower polarization contrast with their backgrounds (making them harder to spot) than carangid species that normally inhabit reefs. Furthermore, the researchers found that this reflective camouflage was optimal at angles from which predators most often spot fish, such as from directly below the fish and at angles perpendicular to their length. By looking at the platelets of open water fish under the microscope, the team found that the platelets align well on vertical axes, allowing fish to reflect the predictable downward direction of light in the open ocean. Yet the platelets are angled in way that diffuses light along the horizontal axis, the researchers say. They suggest that these different axes work together to reflect a wide range of depolarized light, offering better camouflage abilities to their hosts.

The AAAS has made available a video combining recordings from the researchers and animation to illustrate the research,

Be sure you can hear the audio as this won’t make much sense otherwise.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Open-ocean fish reveal an omnidirectional solution to camouflage in polarized environments by Parrish C. Brady, Alexander A. Gilerson, George W. Kattawar, James M. Sullivan, Michael S. Twardowski, Heidi M. Dierssen, Meng Gao, Kort Travis, Robert Ian Etheredge, Alberto Tonizzo, Amir Ibrahim, Carlos Carrizo, Yalong Gu, Brandon J. Russell, Kathryn Mislinski, Shulei Zha1, Molly E. Cummings. Science 20 November 2015: Vol. 350 no. 6263 pp. 965-969 DOI: 10.1126/science.aad5284

This paper is behind a paywall.