Scientists Crack The Physics Of Coffee Rings
by JOE PALCA

Marina Dominguez/NPR
Scientists now know why coffee rings have dark, well-defined edges, as seen in the image above. The research finding may have implications on the development of inks and paints.
A lot of simple things in science turn out to be quite complicated. Take, for example, coffee: You may have noticed that a spilled drop of coffee doesn’t dry as a brown blob, but rather as a clear blob with a dark ring around the edge.
It’s taken physicists more than a decade to figure out why this effect, known technically as “the coffee ring effect,” happens. But now they think they have an answer.
The scientists who cracked the problem weren’t initially studying the coffee ring effect at all. Peter Yunker and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania were studying how different-shaped particles — like spheres, egg-shaped, or even more elongated particles — pack together when the liquid they are in evaporates.
Ring Or No Ring?

EnlargePeter J. Yunker and Arjun G. Yodh/University of Pennsylvania
Coffee, like many liquids, contains tiny, spherical particles (see the video below). When a drop of the liquid dries, forces push the particles toward the edge, where they are deposited in a thick line.

EnlargePeter J. Yunker and Arjun G. Yodh/University of Pennsylvania
When the particles in a liquid are elongated, they slightly deform the surface of a drop of liquid, changing the forces inside the drop. When it dries, a solid layer is formed, rather than a ring.
So first they looked at what happened when liquids with spherical particles evaporated; these formed a ring like coffee does.
“But when we evaporated the drop with the elongated particles, instead of forming a ring, they were spread out across the entire area covered by the drop,” Yunker says.
This was the aha moment: Maybe it was the shape of the particles that were responsible for the coffee ring effect. Coffee does have particles in it, but Yunker didn’t know whether they were spherical or not.
So he did what any good scientist would do: “We went down to the building coffee machine, put 35 cents in, got a cup of coffee, went back upstairs to the microscope, put it on a slide, took a look, and, at least on the micron scale, the particles that we saw were spherical in shape,” he says.
Deforming The Drop
That might be enough proof for most people. But Yunker wanted to look at the effect in conditions he could control precisely, like the size of the particles and their exact shape. So he decided to make particles that could easily be manipulated.
“Our particles were made from polystyrene, so they’re just plastic particles,” he says.

Credit: Kurtis Sensenig, University of Pennsylvania

Sure enough, when he let a drop of liquid with round particles in it evaporate, it formed a ring. When he tried it with elongated particles, he saw no ring. So why did the shape make a difference?
“When an elongated particle reaches the surface of the drop, it deforms the surface,” Yunker says. Deforming the surface of the drop seems to be the key. “When spheres reach the surface of the drop, their shape does not induce the same deformation.”
Without the deformation, the particles travel to the edge of the drop and form a ring. With the deformation that the elliptical particles cause, there’s no ring. (You can see this effect in the video at the bottom of this page.)
Results of the study (which was not sponsored by Starbucks) appear in the journal Nature.
From Coffee To Printers
Arjun Yodh, director of the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter at the University of Pennsylvania, was a co-author of the paper.
“At some level it was a curiosity, but then, actually, there’s a lot of interesting physics about why it happens,” Yodh says. And there are practical applications that go beyond coffee. “A lot of times when you’re drying something, you’d rather make it uniform than to make it all congregate to the edge.”
Think of a thin film of paint or ink from an inkjet printer — you don’t want darker edges around each letter in a document.
Joan Curry, a chemist at the University of Arizona, says the new research appears to have solved that problem. “They found a variable that they can tweak — apparently it’s not too hard to do — and they can change whether this film is uniform or not.”

www.npr.org/2011/08/17/139681851/scientists-crack-the-physics-of-coffee-rings” title=”coffee ring”>

This video, produced by the University of Pennsylvania, shows what the coffee ring effect looks like under a microscope. Watch how round particles speed out to the edges while elongated particles stay in place as the liquid dries. Some of the footage has been sped up 25 times.

Five tethered balloons would loft 1.5 million tonnes of titanium dioxide particles into the stratosphere each year. The balloon size is far larger than any launched to date to avoid ‘blow over’ from the fierce winds that the tether will experience 10 km above the Earth. The cost of the technology is significantly cheaper than other proposed stratospheric particle injection systems such as aircraft, artillery, and even tall towers. (Picture credit: IChemE/A Revell)
“While it’s essential that we work to reduce carbon dioxide emissions now, it would be wise to have a well-researched emergency system in reserve as a Plan B,” says Davidson.

The idea may sound like science fiction; but the concept in fact mimics the earth-cooling effects of large volcanic eruptions which occur several times a century. When in 1991 Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, it caused temperatures to drop by around 0.5oC around the globe for two years, ending most talk of global warming during this period.

The eruption threw 20 million tons of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere, forming a fine mist of sulphuric acid particles that spread over the globe in a matter of months.

As the size of volcanic aerosol particles is similar to the wavelength of sunlight, they scattered a small proportion of the light (~1 %), and hence its heat back into space. The Earth cooled.

Adding sulphuric acid to the stratosphere degrades the ozone layer, and may cause regional changes in precipitation. We need a benign but similarly sized particle; Davidson suggests Titanium Dioxide (TiO2), mankind’s most commonly-used pigment. It is stable in air, non-toxic and seven-times more effective at scattering light than sulphuric acid. Titanium is abundant in the earth’s crust and five million tonnes a year of pigment is produced currently so supply appears feasible. If you are reading this on a printed page the ink and the paper probably both have a TiO2 pigment in them.

With a candidate particle identified, the next challenge is devising a system to effectively and economically lift and disperse millions of tons of particles some 20 km (~ 65,000 feet) up into the stratosphere, so they stay up for a couple of years and do not immediately get rained out.

Davidson says: “The impact of global warming is predicted to be most severe on the world’s poorest peoples, both because of their lack of resources and because of where they happen to be living. I would hope we could ensure that these peoples have a stake in decision-making and the opportunity to have their voice heard, alongside the richer countries, and appropriate NGO’s (for example environmentalists), as well as other bodies.

“Ideally an independent charitable trust funded by a variety of stakeholders from around the world would research not only the technology but suitable governance, legal and ethical frameworks,” adds Davidson.

The total capital cost of the balloon, tethers, ultra high pressure pumps, and the production and transport of the particles is estimated to be £500m plus £600m in annual operating costs in a paper to be published by the Royal Society. These costs are perhaps thirty times lower than the next best technologies considered, such as large numbers of very sophisticated jet aircraft, and do not have the same carbon footprint. “Space mirrors on the scale needed and 20km tall towers are likely to be for the 22nd century not this one.”

Very approximate estimates are that we’d need to disperse over a million tonnes of titanium dioxide per year to keep planetary temperatures constant if CO2 levels in the atmosphere double. If such an insurance policy was needed we would have to do this for 50 to 150 years. Ocean acidification would be a worry but this might be still worse if such temperature control did not keep methane emissions from melting arctic tundra or seas under control.

At current prices, supplying these particles would cost around £3bn per year or around 50p per person per year.

Davidson says: “Creating a suitable insurance policy for climate remediation is a vital task. It will not do to underestimate the challenges. Much research and work on governance is still needed, but a vision is now on offer for debate, and development where potential means of solving some of the most difficult technical challenges have been identified. It would be short-sighted to put-off research of such a safety-device – like trying to develop a life-jacket when you’re swept out to sea and struggling in the water.”

Investigators trace of role reusable grocery bag in norovirus outbreak

Published: Wednesday, May 9, 2012 – 14:33 in Health & Medicine
Oregon investigators recently mapped the trail of an outbreak of a nasty stomach bug among participants in a girls’ soccer tournament to a reusable open top grocery bag stored in a hotel bathroom. Their findings, which illustrate the role that inanimate objects can play in spreading norovirus infection, appear in The Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Noroviruses are a leading cause of gastroenteritis worldwide and the most common cause of foodborne outbreaks in the United States. Highly contagious, even in low concentrations, the viruses spread efficiently from feces and vomit by direct contact or by indirect transmission from viral contamination of surfaces. In October 2010, a cluster of gastroenteritis that appeared in a group of people with no apparent direct physical contact with a pathogen challenged investigators to find the cause and take appropriate control measures.

In the study, Kimberly K. Repp, PhD, MPH, of Oregon Health and Sciences University, and William E. Keene, PhD, MPH, of the Oregon Public Health Division in Portland, investigated an outbreak in a group of 17 Oregon girls, 13-14 years old, and their four adult chaperones attending a soccer tournament in Washington state. All had traveled in private automobiles, shared hotel rooms, and eaten at local restaurants. Eight cases were identified, including the index patient who was presumably infected prior to the trip. There was no direct contact between the original patient and her teammates after her symptoms began; before her overt symptoms began she left her room and moved in with a chaperone. The girl subsequently began vomiting and having diarrhea in the chaperone’s bathroom. The outbreak affecting the rest of the team began several days later; they were exposed by handling a bag of snacks that unfortunately had been stored in the hotel bathroom. Virus aerosolized within the bathroom likely settled onto the grocery bag and its contents. Matching viruses were found on the reusable shopping bag two weeks later.

The investigation confirmed the great potential for contamination of surfaces in norovirus outbreaks on cruise ships, in nursing homes, and in other group settings. “While we certainly recommend not storing food in bathrooms,” the authors note, “it is more important to emphasize that areas where aerosol exposures may have occurred should be thoroughly disinfected; this includes not only exposed surfaces, but also objects in the environment” that could become contaminated and spread infection. The authors point to some of the practices that can be put in place to limit outbreaks caused by such indirect contact, including disinfection of affected areas and the use of multiple bathrooms with one dedicated for use by those who are sick.

In an accompanying editorial, Aron J. Hall, DVM, MSPH, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, notes that noroviruses “are perhaps the perfect human pathogens,” causing an estimated 21 million cases of acute gastroenteritis annually in the U.S. alone. The investigation of this outbreak, as reported by the study authors, “provides a fascinating example of how a unique exposure and transmission scenario can result in a norovirus outbreak.”

Fast Facts:

1. Norovirus can spread infection through contact with surfaces and objects contaminated by aerosolized particles.

2. Noroviruses are highly contagious, even in low concentration, and the viruses spread efficiently from feces and vomit by direct and indirect contact.

3. Noroviruses are the leading cause of endemic diarrheal disease across all age groups, the leading cause of foodborne disease, and the cause of half of all gastroenteritis outbreaks worldwide.

4. Whenever possible, ill persons should use a separate bathroom to reduce the potential for spread of the virus. Notify family members or cleaning staff about the need for thorough disinfection of surfaces.

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FOR Dr. Philip M. Tierno, business travel means combat. The enemy is heartless and relentless, stealthy and ubiquitous. It is poised to attack every second of the day, even when he’s asleep. It exploits his rare moments of weakness and turns everyone and everything around him into agents who thoughtlessly do its bidding.

Dr. Tierno is not a corporate security expert trying to outflank rogue competitors. His enemy is infectious disease. He’s a professor of microbiology at the New York University School of Medicine who sees the common places of travel — cabs, airports, airplanes, hotels, restaurants and business meetings — as battlefields in the never-ending war against germs.

“Fecal organisms, oral bacterium, respiratory flora and thousands of other pathogens are here, there, everywhere,” Dr. Tierno says with studied calm.

Of course, you don’t need to travel to encounter germs. They’re all over your home and office. They’re lurking at the supermarket and the pharmacy. They may be on your hand right now. A Yale researcher recently found that a person entering a room could add about 37 million bacteria to the air every hour. Still, business travel poses special challenges like increased exposure to germs, the long-term health effects of the road warrior lifestyle and the difficulties of finding and paying for quality care away from home.

Getting sick is basically a numbers game. Eighty percent of all infectious diseases are transmitted by direct or indirect human contact. When we travel, our encounters skyrocket. When you lay your hand against the seat of a cab to pull yourself in, it is as if you are shaking hands with every rider since the cab was last cleaned (a concept best measured in geologic time). Gripping the airport escalator hand rail is like holding hands with thousands of fellow passengers. Your close encounters of the infectious kind continue on the plane as you touch the armrest of your seat, the tray table, in-flight magazine and the lavatory faucet and door handle. And your hotel? Depending on when and how it was cleaned, you may not be sleeping and showering by yourself.

Now consider that only about half of us wash our hands after going to the bathroom. It’s enough to make you echo a line from David Foster Wallace’s novel, “Infinite Jest”: “Yes, I’m paranoid — but am I paranoid enough?”

The link between travel and illness may seem self-evident but there is little hard data precisely defining the risk. A wealth of research has documented the swarming mass of microscopic meanies that hitch a ride on us as we travel. Scientists have swabbed everything from taxi cabs to hotel remote controls for analysis. Outbreaks of influenza, measles, severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, tuberculosis and smallpox have been reported on commercial airliners since 1946. The Sept. 11 attacks provided a tantalizing piece of evidence. The flu season arrived 13 days later than normal in 2001, perhaps because the government shut down the air transport system (a k a the germ transport system).

More broadly, a study of data collected from passengers flying between San Francisco and Denver found that travel increased their likelihood of getting sick by 20 percent. “It seems clear that the full range of experiences we have while traveling, from the time we leave our house, to the time we return, makes it more likely we’ll come down with something,” said Dr. Mark Gendreau, an expert in travel and aviation medicine based in Massachusetts.

The one bright spot is the lack of evidence to date that airport security poses any risk of radiation poisoning.

Before you shut your windows, lock your doors, cancel your Expedia account and download videoconferencing software, remember that all these risks can be mitigated. Unless you have an open wound, the germs you collect on your hands cannot enter your body easily unless you touch your eyes, nose or mouth. That is easier said than done; we touch our mouths and noses about 200 times a day. A good cleaning with soap and water — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends washing your hands for about 50 seconds, the time it takes to hum two choruses of “Happy Birthday” — or a drop of hand sanitizer does the trick in most cases. But that only wipes the slate clean, providing little protection after that moment. Seasoned travelers sanitize early and often. (Researchers pooh-pooh the idea that too much cleanliness will weaken an adult’s immune system. The bottom line: That which does not kill me can make me sick.)

Examinations of the long-term effects of business travel both clarify and muddy the issue. A study released in 2011 by Columbia University found that people who were away from home at least 14 days a month on business were far more likely than light travelers to suffer from high cholesterol, high blood pressure and obesity than those who traveled 13 days or less. This is not surprising given that travel often includes long periods of physical inactivity on planes and trains, and in automobiles and meetings; poor diet; increased alcohol consumption and a lack of sleep.

The study also found that those who traveled only a few days a month tended to enjoy better health than co-workers who never made business trips. “We found that health outcomes were consistently worse for those not traveling and those traveling the most,” wrote the researchers, Catherine A. Richards and Andrew G. Rundle.

Business travel is also linked to increases in stress. A study of World Bank employees found that those who traveled on four or more missions a year were three times more likely to file insurance claims for stress-related issues than their stationary colleagues. The World Bank also found that spouses of employees who traveled frequently were twice as likely to file claims for psychological disorders as the spouses of nontravelers.

In response, the authors of the Columbia study suggest that businesses invest in “employee education programs on the association between travel and health and on the strategies to improve diet and activity while traveling.”

Corporations are just beginning to receive that message, according to Ron DiLeo, executive director of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, an education and advocacy group with 31,000 members around the world. He noted that two of the 20 sessions at his organization’s April conference in San Francisco focused on health issues. “While many businesses are concerned about wellness, it is not a big headliner in specific regard to travel,” he said. “However, that is starting to change as businesses focus more strongly on their moral and legal duty to take care of their employees.”

That includes efforts to help employees anticipate risks and identify sources of care before they hit the road. In response, health care companies have been formed to assist people traveling for business or pleasure.

“So many people travel to often remote parts of the world without any plan of what to do if they get sick,” said Dr. Miles J. Varn, chief medical officer of PinnacleCare, a health advisory service based in Baltimore. They do not have a doctor to contact, he added, “and haven’t made arrangements to pay for medical care, or provide for a medical evacuation.”

Dr. Varn said international travel insurance, which usually guarantees payment for health services, was essential. So, too, is preparation: “I strongly advise going to the C.D.C. Web site to find out about local health issues whether you are in Toledo or Timbuktu.”

Despite their best efforts, even the most vigilant travelers will get sick. While the average American gets slightly more than two colds per year, Dr. Tierno, the N.Y.U. microbiologist, said he hasn’t had one in years. He remembers the last time all too well, as it began on a business trip to Paris.

The woman seated next to him was coughing and sneezing. “Finally I said to her, ‘You have to sequester that sneeze.’ ” She said, ‘I didn’t sneeze on you.’ I asked to be moved, but the flight attendant said the plane was full. Three days later, I got a cold.

“Now,” he added, “I travel with a mask.”

A future project will be “Armpit-pa-looza”—a study of the microbes in the armpits of humans and other primates. Bacteria in the armpit produce a distinctive odor that we recognize in ourselves and others near us. Many scientists believe that this odor can communicate not only who we are, but also if we have certain diseases. A better understanding of armpit bacteria could have a wide range of applications in health and hygiene.

http://aem.asm.org/content/76/5/1341.abstract

EnlargeC. Goldsmith, P. Feorino, E. L. Palmer, W. R. McManus/CDC Public Health Image Library
The HIV-1 virus cultivated with human lymphocytes.
April 17, 2012
If you’ve ever had a bacterial infection like staph or strep throat, your doctor may have prescribed penicillin. But if you’ve had the flu or a common cold virus, penicillin won’t work. That’s because antibacterials only kill bacteria, and both the flu and the common cold are viruses. So for illnesses like the flu, doctors prescribe antiviral drugs, which target the mechanisms that viruses use to reproduce.
“For example, there are antivirals for the flu that interfere with the virus as it tries to get out of its host cell,” says science writer Carl Zimmer. “So this molecule latches on to that particular protein that the virus uses to escape, and interferes with it so that the virus is trapped inside.”
Zimmer’s latest piece for Wired magazine profiles the scientists who are developing antiviral medications, and examines the new ways medicine is working to attack viruses.
“There are some really amazing antivirals that have been invented over the last 40 years,” he says. “There are antivirals for herpes. There are antivirals for HIV. … Now, if you were to get Ebola and you tried to take HIV drugs, they’d do you no good at all because that HIV drug only works for HIV. It’s a narrow-spectrum drug, and really, there are no broad-spectrum antivirals, at this point.”
But scientists are now working to create a “penicillin-like” drug that will target viruses more broadly. In San Francisco, a company called Prosetta is working on a drug that doesn’t affect a virus directly. Instead, it works by affecting the proteins that are naturally in cells that help viruses replicate.
“The basic idea behind it is that viruses need help to build themselves,” says Zimmer. “What happens is quite amazing: [Viruses] get lots of different proteins in our cells and cooperate to push their own proteins into place. And so the viruses need these groups of host proteins to form.”
Prosetta created a drug that prevents the host proteins from performing their cooperative jobs and helping the viruses out. Preliminary studies have shown that targeting these host proteins — and not the virus itself — can stop Ebola, influenza, rabies and other viruses.
Other researchers are working to replace or help interferons, our body’s own natural virus-fighting system. Eleanor Fish, a researcher at the University of Toronto, is heading a project to create synthetic interferon, in order to accelerate the body’s virus-fighting response.
“Today, people with Hepatitis C can get interferon treatment, but it doesn’t work all that well. It has some benefit, but not as much as Eleanor Fish would like,” says Zimmer. “So she has been essentially tweaking the interferon molecule to make it more effective, to make it last longer, to make it safe and to make it cheap. Because what she wants to do is deploy interferon all over the world where there isn’t fancy refrigeration. She wants to help people who are dealing with viruses in very remote places.”
A third approach, says Zimmer, involves creating an artificial protein that would latch onto viruses and then instruct them to literally self-destruct. Spearheaded by Todd Rider at MIT, the project has been tested in cells and in mice.
“Rider’s basically hot-wiring your cells so that as soon as they get infected by a virus, that trips a switch,” says Zimmer. “This doesn’t exist naturally, but if you were to take a pill, the thinking is, then this molecule would go into your infected cells, and as soon as it detected the virus, it would kill the infected cell, and you would recover from your disease.”
But successfully eradicating viruses may bring a host of other problems, says Zimmer. He points to broad-spectrum antibiotics, which wipe out good bacteria in addition to bad bacteria.
“Eventually your body may recover, and it can take awhile, and there may be some bad consequences of the antibiotics themselves,” he says. “So it’s going to be interesting to see what happens in the future if we are, in fact, knocking out lots of viruses. Because we don’t understand the full ecology of the viruses that get into our bodies.”
There are trillions of viruses that live in our bodies, even when we’re not sick, says Zimmer.
“Some are harmful, some may not be harmful,” he says. “Some may even help us defend against other viruses. It’s very complicated in there, and we don’t really understand it very well yet.”
Transplanting Gut Bacteria
Physicians are now using bacteria to combat other diseases. Zimmer points to an example of a patient infected with theClostridium difficile bacteria, which causes severe diarrhea and can frequently return, even when treated with antibiotics. The patient was treated with a transfusion of gut microbials from a healthy individual’s fecal material to restore the bacterial flora in her intestinal tract.
“Literally two days later she started feeling better, and a couple weeks later, when they went to sample the bacteria that was there, they couldn’t find the C. difficile anymore. It was just gone,” he says. “The only thing they had done was essentially restore her ecology, essentially like restoring a wetland.”
Zimmer says fecal transplants have only been performed on patients when all other options fail — but they are seemingly quite effective.
“The problem is, as some other journalists have reported, is that the FDA has a very difficult time figuring out how to come up with regulations for this,” he says. “Before it’s going to become a widespread practice, the FDA is going to have to move beyond its old paradigm of giving people regular drugs to being able to give people tailored concoctions of living things — of bacteria, of maybe even viruses — as medical treatments.”
These bacteria and viruses work in conjunction with other bacteria and viruses in the body, but scientists still know very little about their mechanisms, says Zimmer.
“There’s this whole ecosystem of interactions going on inside our own bodies that we do not understand — barely at all,” he says. “Scientists are just starting to figure it out with very big projects where they’re sequencing all the genes these microbes have. But they’re just at the beginning of understanding it.”

Here is Mike on TV in Kansas City.Mike King on Kansaa City TV

http://youtu.be/Nyn5nwUgNd0

Unfortunately, healthcare acquired infections know no geographical boundaries. This investigative report on the problems with environmental services ( ‘cleaning’ to us laymen) is instructive. With increasing cost constraints, short cuts are taken. All the more reason to have self-cleaning surfaces provided by OxiTitan working continuously 24/7 to reduce the bio-burden in between routine cleaning.

See the story here:

http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/2012/dirtyhospitals/