THE NUCLEOPHILIC SUBSTITUTION LOVE TRIANGLE: AN ANALOGY

by: Karen Quinto (Copyright Nov. 27, 2010)

It is daunting how complex molecular interactions can be when delving into the theories behind organic chemistry, until you realize this: they are comparable to human relationships.

The effect of substituents on nucleophilic substitution reactions may seem like an intimidating concept, yet it speaks very plainly about relationship dynamics the way it is encountered in real life. On a molecular level, the story is a tragic romance; it is the parting of ways between two molecules and the broken bonds that shatter into pieces, much like broken hearts.

The love triangle in this molecular drama is between the electrophile, the nucleophile and the leaving group. Miss Electrophile is in a relationship with soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, appropriately named Mister Leaving Group. In a very sexy manner, she is being swept away by Señorito[1] Nucleophile, the mysterious and alluring young man who catches her unawares.

Love is a fickle thing. Miss Electrophile finds herself with one dilemma and two options. She is madly in love with Señorito Nucleophile and needs to let go of Mister Leaving Group. Just like romantic relationships, the electrophile can first break the bond with the leaving group and later on form the bond with the nucleophile. In a nucleophilic substitution reaction, this is described as an SN1 unimolecular reaction (think of it as “one-at-a-time”).

The letter “F” in figure 2 are other substituents bonded to the electrophile. For the purpose of the analogy, they symbolize “friends”. In an SN1 reaction, the rate of the substitution reaction (how fast it occurs) only depends on the concentration of “E-LG” because they are the only ones present in the transition state, which is the slowest step of the reaction. The substitution reaction rate only depends on how long it takes for the electrophile to break bonds with the leaving group because that is what takes the longest to happen. In other words, Miss Electrophile and Mister Leaving Group were having relationship issues way before Señorito Nucleophile came along.

Unfortunately, what sometimes happens with an electrophile is that while still in the current relationship with a leaving group, a nucleophile comes along who is cuter, nicer and more romantic. In this case, Miss Electrophile has no other choice but to break the bond with Mister Leaving Group while simultaneously forming a new bond with Señorito Nucleophile. This is the SN2 bimolecular reaction (better remembered as playing “two” guys). Sadly, Miss Electrophile can be a heartless wench. Karma will get her one day and she knows it.

In the SN2 reaction, the rate depends on both the concentration of “E-LG” and “Nu”. The reaction occurs as fast as the nucleophile can form the bond with the electrophile in a backside attack, a term which often causes giggling amongst hormonal university kids. The backside attack causes the inversion of the substituents bonded to the electrophile and the displacement of the leaving group. Unlike the SN1 reaction, SN2 involves the movement of these substituents, requiring energy in order to overcome. As the Spice Girls lyrics go, “if you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends”. They must have been inspired by the SN2 nucleophilic substitution reaction when they wrote that song.

The transition state determines the overall rate of reaction because it is the slowest to occur. In an SN2 reaction, the energy required to reach the transition state is highly dependent on the substituents bonded to the electrophile. This is because the backside attack becomes increasingly difficult when the crowding of these substituents create steric hindrance, which is akin to the frustration a guy feels when the girl that he likes is always surrounded by a swarm of her girl friends when trying to court her.

The more friends that hang around, the harder it is for Señor Nucleophile to make his moves. Sometimes, Miss Electrophile is so surrounded, the bond cannot form. The energy required to break and form these bonds increase as the number of substituents increase. Their structure is also important; the more steric hindrance they create, the more energy is needed to overcome them. In SN2 , substituents play a major role in the reaction rate of the nucleophilic substitution reaction.

The trials and tribulations of the SN1 and SN2 nucleophilic substitution is a love triangle that makes it easy to wonder if, after all, we are all just made of molecules.

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[1] Señorito means “Mister” in Spanish when referring to an unmarried man; diminutive of Señor.

HOLES IN THE HERD (written for Afexa Life Sciences)

As public trust of vaccination decreases, deadly but preventable diseases will be on the rise

By: Karen Quinto

(written for Afexa Life Sciences)

 

If you’ve ever watched the Discovery Channel, you may have seen footage of animals traveling in herds. They keep the young, old, and weak members to the inside, surrounded by the stronger ones on the outside.

It’s called herd immunity, and it’s a clever trick that keeps predators from picking off the easiest targets.

Believe it or not, the population has the same type of strategy when it comes to immunity from deadly diseases.

Say the polio virus is the big bad wolf. If everyone around you has been vaccinated, you can still enjoy the benefits of immunity without being vaccinated. The disease will have a hard time spreading with so few vulnerable hosts to attack and will likely fizzle out.

But now, as more people opt out of voluntary vaccinations, holes in the herd are beginning to appear. Suddenly, the safety net we once enjoyed is not so strong. Deadly viruses that had once been all but eradicated may slowly creep back into the fold.

It may seem hard to believe the impact of these highly infectious diseases. You probably don’t know anyone who has died of measles, mumps or polio.

But you might soon.

Losing herd immunity

The flu may send you to bed for an entire week, but it isn’t worth vaccinating for — or is it?

“If you take vaccines, you would be less resistant to the flu,” says Shravya Gunda, a 19-year-old second-year biomedical engineering student at Ryerson University. “Back in India, I never had to take any shots and I never got any fever because I was resistant to everything. So, I don’t want to take the risk [of taking shots].”

This mentality is not uncommon as motivation to vaccinate is lower amongst most healthy people because of the individual’s perception of personal risk. In the journal Human Vaccine, a 2008-2009 study conducted to assess influenza vaccination among parents and guardians revealed that for every 23 babies vaccinated against H1N1, only one parent decides to get that same vaccination. Reasons included reimbursement, medicolegal concern and simply not getting around to it.

Dr. David Fisman of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto can attest to the waning effect of population immunity.

“What we’ve seen is a lot of parents have pulled back on immunization against childhood diseases, which lets these things take off again,” he says. “If you can imagine yourself in  that situation, it doesn’t take much to tip the balance to a point where these diseases that we’ve largely eliminated through immunization start to come back, and that’s exactly what has happened over the last five years.”

The autism scare

A scientific research that claimed to show a relationship between autism and vaccination spurred an anti-vaccination movement. The study, authored by Dr. Andrew Wakefield,  was later debunked, but the frenzy it created has proven difficult to reverse. Infant vaccinations continue to decrease and there is no telling how much of it was caused by the controversy it had ignited.

Dr. Fisman experiences the difficulty within his profession. Because vaccination is effective when nothing is happening, people tend not to appreciate the invisible benefits.

“You’ve got a lot of people looking around going, ‘Well, you know, I don’t see measles, I don’t see mumps, I don’t see rubella, and my kids could get autism if I get them vaccinated. So, for me, the balance of risks and benefits of getting vaccinated are all out of whack and I’m not gonna get them vaccinated,’” he says.

The problem is, herd immunity is essential for preventing the transmission of disease. The more infectious the disease, the larger the portion of the population vaccinated against it must be to confer immunity as a whole. Measles require at least 95% of the herd to be immunized to keep the virus at bay, but the levels are much lower than that even in  industrialized countries like Canada, Australia, England and New Zealand.

Is it worth it?

While the answer for some is an obvious ‘yes’, others face mental stigmas that discourage them from getting vaccinated, from lack of awareness to concern about side effects.

Some people, for instance, are horrified to find out that a ‘flu shot is made out of the same influenza virus particles it is supposed to protect against.  What they are unaware of is that the virus in the shot has been inactivated – damaged by chemical treatment and are no longer virulent. When it is introduced into the body, the immune system responds by making more B cells that are able to create antibodies. These antibodies tag the flu  particles for destruction by other immune system killer cells like neutrophils and macrophages.

Some people claim to be negatively affected by these dead viruses, but may have nothing to do with the virus itself.

“A lot of the side effects of the vaccines aren’t really about the actual immunogenic component of the vaccine,” says Dr. Emily Agard, an immunologist, science outreach educator and professor at Ryerson University. “[For example], it is the additives in the vaccines, like eggs, that some people might have allergies to. In any type of pharmaceuticals, there’s a possibility of side effects.”

In a sense, a vaccine acts like the body’s fire drill in case of a real emergency. It prepares the body for a real virulent attack by stocking it with enough soldiers to fight the good fight. This is what make vaccines so effective and yet so misunderstood at the same time.

(for the transcribed interview with Dr. David Fisman, http://karenquinto.com/blog-2/transcript-of-the-vaccination-interview/)

Photo: Elizabeth Fischer and Kim Hasenkrug, NIH

References

Toback S, Carr W, Hackell J, Bhatt P, Ryan A, Ambrose CS. 2011. Influenza vaccination of parents and guardians by US paediatricians. Human Vaccines. Vol. 7(4). 436- 40

Freeman, Scott. 2008. Biological science . 3rd ed. San Francisco: Pearson/Benjamin Cummings. Pg. 441

Alkuwari MG, Aziz NA, Nazzal ZA, Al-Nuaimi SA. 2011. Pandemic influenza A/H1N1 vaccination uptake among health care workers in Qatar: motivators and barriers. Vaccine. Vol. 29(11):2206-11.

KUNG-FLU FIGHTING: an infographic

This was my first time using Adobe Illustrator to make an infographic. The cells were made from clay painted with acrylic, which I photographed and put together on AI. I made it with a vertical layout because this was intended to be for a website.

The Ryersonian features our Water Innovation Lab projects

The Ryersonian features our Water Innovation Lab projects

Ryerson’s liquid dreams win big at water innovation awards

Good ideas were flowing at a recent conference on water innovation, where former and current Ryerson students took home honours for their ideas. We talk to them about their projects.

By Calvin Dao on October 9, 2013.

Filed under News

Good ideas were flowing at a recent conference on water innovation, where former and current Ryerson students took home honours for their ideas. An alumnus and a fourth-year student both received innovation awards at the 2013 Water Innovation Lab, held in Alberta from Sept. 24 to 29.

Ryersonian Reporter Calvin Dao spoke with the winners about their projects.

Josh Tzventarny (Twitter)

Josh Tzventarny, a graduate of the urban and regional planning program, won best overall pitch with his idea of building a community-owned pop company in Iqaluit. He came up with it when he noticed the high consumption rates and the expensive prices of pop in Nunavut.

“[Pop would be] made locally, create jobs and reinvest the profits in the community,” he said.

Trucks currently ship cans and bottles of pop from Montreal to Iqaluit, he said, which heavily affects sale prices. Twelve cans of Schweppes ginger ale, for example, costs about $5 in Toronto and over $80 in Iqaluit. Having a local company would not only bring down the huge costs in logistics but also decrease the amount of fuel emissions.

He said he is “pursuing this cautiously” because of the traditional Inuit culture that may not even want this type of business up there, but he added that he has Ryerson to back him up.

“[The school] has been really supportive in realizing the long-term endeavours and long-time potential,” he said.

 

Karen Quinto

Karen Quinto, an environmental science student, won most innovative pitch with her proposal to use microbial fuel cells—systems that can create energy with bacteria in organic waste—in sewage pipelines to generate more sustainable and renewable electricity.

“If you hybridize a wastewater sewage pipe with a microbial fuel cell design,” she said, “you can essentially make the entire pipeline into a ginormous energy extractor.”

Engineers are currently able to extract energy from waste, she said, but it all has to be dehydrated and transported to a bioreactor where the process can be done. This results in high amounts of fuel emissions, which Quinto’s design would help reduce.

The next step for Quinto and  Tzventarny is to secure funding to develop their plans.

Ryerson Today features Josh Tzventarny and I for being award recipients at the Water Innovation Lab 2013

Home News Events Research Bulletin board Podcasts Contact us Friday, October 4, 2013 Wordsmith weekend School of Journalism celebrates 60th anniversary with reception tonight, public panels tomorrow Research news Nature vs. nurture Researchers explore role of gender stereotypes in workplace competition News Up all Nuit Students, faculty, alumni to feature four projects at Saturday’s Nuit Blanche John Ralston Saul appointed distinguished visiting professor Prominent Canadian intellectual and accomplished author to develop “Big Idea” discussion series Student, alumnus recognized for innovative ideas Fourth-year environmental science student Karen Quinto, and urban and regional planning ’07 graduate Josh Tzventarny both picked up innovation awards at the 2013 Water Innovation Lab in Alberta. Quinto won Most Innovative Pitch for her urban energy idea for microbial fuel cells harnessing electricity from bacteria in soil. Tzventarny received Best Overall Pitch for his proposal of a social enterprise in Nunavut that brews local beverages, creates jobs and reduces environmental impact.

THE OUTFALL OF DECISIONS (published article, Influents Spring 2013)

Influents Spring 2013, Official Publication of the Water Environment Association of Ontario.

The Outfall of Decisions: how decision-making

strategies affect the clarity of solutions

BY: KAREN QUINTO, VP INTERNAL RYERSON UNIVERSITY-WEAO

Each time a Torontonian flushes the toilet, the city is another step closer to footing a $330-million bill. In a city of 2.6 million people, that’s an expense of $127 for each one of its residents.

And that’s just to replace two aging pumping stations that feed sewage directly to the Ashbridges Bay Treatment Plant.

“Toronto Water has a large capital budget and our projects in the wastewater plants are among the largest and most complex in the Division. We have started the process of catching up on our backlog of capital work but much still needs to be done,” says Colin Marshall, Manager of the Ashbridges Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant. “We have aging infrastructure that we’re trying to improve, like our pumping stations. One of these pump stations was initially built in 1919 and the other was built in the early 1970s. They are now approaching the end of their useful life and so tough decisions have to be made: do we refurbish what is there or do we build a new single pumping station to replace them?”

This significant expenditure is only one of many upgrades the city of Toronto has had to put on the backburner. And like many of them, it will require attention and resources at a moment’s notice. How decision makers approach the process of balancing the many factors when making their spending decisions can be the difference between a prudent choice and a wasteful one.

Decisions governing environmental protection are often a product of their time

It is not obvious to previous generations what consequences an outfall will have on the environment. Before the world war, the environment was hardly on the radar. But when environmental topics come up today, buzz words like “conservation”, “issues” and “management” indicate that times have changed. Dwindling natural resources are now being safeguarded, largely due to more rigorous regulations.

When the city council voted in 1940 for the partial treatment of the outfall at Ashbridges Bay, it meant the city’s wastewater would bypass secondary treatment and instead opt for the chlorination of the primary treatment discharge. The motivation behind the decision was to reduce the total cost of operation. The rationale that Lake Ontario would simply dilute the pollution from the outfall gained approval. The council figured the North Toronto treatment plant, which used secondary treatment from the very beginning, would be sufficient— especially since it was one of the first facilities to do so in North America in the 1920s. According to the Toronto archives, full treatment would have cost Ashbridges Bay an additional $4 million better spent elsewhere. It was only in the 1960s that Ashbridges Bay upgraded to secondary treatment.

It seemed harmless enough at the time, but today, discharging toxic effluent is not an option anymore, and for good reason.

The Wastewater Systems Effluent Regulations mandate stringent protocols against “acutely lethal” pollutants—specifically effluent that at 100% concentration kills more than 50% of the rainbow trout subjected to it during a 96-hour bench-scale test.

Yet only last year, raw wastewater dumping was surprisingly endorsed by a coalition of marine scientists in Victoria, British Columbia.

“The truth is, we’re in a very fortunate position here in Victoria in which to discharge sewage into a marine setting,” said Tom Pedersen, director of the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, as told to National Post in an article on July 23, 2012. “It’s mostly organic matter, and Mother Nature’s really good at processing that.”

This was shortly discredited too.

Victoria is now in the process of building a new wastewater treatment plant; its operational cost is expected to reach between $14 million and $15 million annually. Dr. Pedersen deems the decision an unnecessary expenditure and sees it as mere environmental ideologies of voters and the politicians that pander to them.

The jury is out whether its efficiency will justify its cost, but the decision was made based on the cautionary approach that all pollution has deleterious effects, to some extent. The ocean environment—whether or not it is good at processing waste—is not an exception.

But while Victoria, B.C can afford such a forward thinking upgrade right now, not everycity or town is as fortunate. Halifax, for example, current only screens gross solids from its effluent before discharging into the ocean. Montreal only applies primary treatment for the outfall going into the St. Lawrence River. Cash-strapped locales need a bit of creativity to come up with alternative pocket-friendly solutions..

When you don’t have resources, be resourceful

A treatment plant manager in the tiny rural community of Roseburg, Oregon knows that in their plant, they will not have the funding to fix major breakdowns.

Their outfalls flowing into the nearby South Umpqua River were inevitably poor. Underperforming and out of compliance, the Department of Environmental Quality required them to upgrade, but the town of about 500 residents could not cough up the $800 million needed to bring them up to standard.

What Oregon lacked in finances, it made up for with vast available land. Constructed wetlands and lagoons are a natural way to simulate anaerobic treatment of wastewater and can act as an alternative wastewater treatment process instead of a standard treatment plant. By building inexpensive lagoons and wetlands, the town was able to meet their needs.

Other small towns and rural communities have come up with creative solutions too. Some have opted for the separation of wastewater flows to adjust treatment according to contaminants. Flow decentralization increases efficiency and reduces the flow in very small facilities where capacity is an issue. Some have begun campaigns to use appliances that conserve water and have mandated re-use of wastewater for non-potable purposes such as watering lawns.

But not every good opportunity has a happy ending. Sometimes disastrous consequences result from biting off more than you can chew.

If you build it, they will come—but at what cost?

When business opportunity knocked on the town doors of Burley, Idaho, it seemed too good to ignore. Even when they knew their treatment plant was out of shape, it was nothing a little elbow grease couldn’t solve.

The 10,000 residents forked over a sewage fee hike of $45.50 per household when their treatment facility completed its upgrade in 2007.

The fee was only $3.26 when the project began nine years ago, all in the name of attracting even more businesses. And attract them it did.

Jobs and businesses flourished in 2003 when the town had acquired an additional industrial treatment plant. The town routed the wastes of two milk processing companies—a flow-intensive industry—to the functional, albeit old wastewater facility.

The state had also given a $499,000 grant for additional infrastructure needs, which included a wastewater pipe junction to connect to their newest business prospect, a food processing plant that had set up shop. But the old industrial plant had reached its pollution limit and was soon out of compliance; it just couldn’t handle all that milk waste and so the plant fell apart.

The force of the flow punched holes inside the bioreactors, rendering them useless. As a band-aid solution, the industrial waste was promptly redirected to the primary residential plant. But this only overwhelmed its system too and both plants were forced to dump untreated wastewater into Snake River, violating their permits and totaling $6 million in damages and upgrade costs.

Moral of the story: Saying yes to a good opportunity one is ill-equipped to handle is a recipe for disaster. Knowing the limits of a plant’s flow capacity before using it is vital to success.

Perhaps the best example in Toronto’s history of a decision-maker who got it right is Public Works Commissioner Roland Caldwell Harris, not that everyone thought so, especially at the time.

Harris had planning foresight that Toronto could just barely afford when he took office in 1912. Many criticized Harris’s decision to equip the Prince Edward Viaduct with a future subway deck as recklessly wasteful. Yet sixty years later, Toronto thanked him as the Bloor-Danforth line opened without any extensive reconstruction. When he later designed the North Toronto treatment plant, he wanted it to blend in with its surroundings. When the facility opened in 1929, it could have very well been a quaint little village. It was seen as a frivolous $1-million plan considering Canada was at the beginning of the Great Depression.

His other masterpiece, the Victoria Park Pumping Station (later renamed R.C. Harris Water Filtration Plant) earned him the moniker “the water czar”. Once regarded as architectural fluff, it is now an elegant part of Toronto’s heritage that services almost 40% of the city’s water supply to this day. All this because of Harris’ insight to build it as a scalable facility that stood the test of time.

The importance of making long-term decisions while considering current limitations is a key aspect of good public works decision-making. Projects often cost more in the long run when funds are not initially spent wisely. A city’s future growth must be considered when planning treatment projects and a realistic assessment of what can and cannot be done is a matter of collaboration between the leaders of the water and wastewater industry, its workers, and the people they serve.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Colin Marshall for taking the time to help me make this article possible. His vast knowledge of Ashbridges Bay Water Treatment plant and his more-than-happy-to-help attitude certainly made the writing process go smoothly. I would also like to thank Rob Moysey, my journalism tutor.

“Adopt-a-Salmon” Restoration Program: for Douglas Adams

March 11, 2013

Douglas Adams is one of my favourite authors and it’s his birthday today!  Serendipitously, I came across the “Adopt-a-Salmon” Restoration Program while researching Ontario watersheds and tributaries for a presentation in my Environmental Science class here at Ryerson.

So, to commemorate his birthday and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I adopted two Atlantic Salmons (it’s only $10 each, AND you get to name them, which is pretty awesome).  So, now I have a male salmon named “Salmon of Doubt“, after the title of the book he was working on at the time of his death, and “Salmon of Knowledge”, his female counterpart and BFF (I’m sure he’ll need one).

So long, Douglas Adams, and thanks for all the fish!

photo:

http://binational.net/lamp/lo_ar_2011_en.pdf

Letter from Ryerson University’s Interim Provost and VP Academic

I feel very honoured! This letter should be for all the ENACTUS team members, but I am grateful nonetheless!

http://karenquinto.com/science-projects/enroot/

Plants and the art of confusion: Dodders, (Z)-3-Hexenyl acetate, and general lack of consensus.

BOTANY

I read an article in Scientific American aptly named “What A Plant Smells” by Daniel Chamovitz.  The story was about the parasitic Dodder: a leafless, too-lazy-to-make-chlorophyll,  orange-coloured  vine that “sniffs out” healthy plants nearby in search of a host to latch onto.  It does this by detecting volatile compounds like beta-mycrene released by succulent tomatoes, which guides it towards the location of said tomato. Upon finding the first tomato leaf with its vine tip, the Dodder will feel around for the tomato’s stem, which it will wrap itself around, sucking out all its hard-earned glucose bling.  Talk about gold-digging and sticking it up to the man!  So, at first, I started to ask: what is the likely explanation why some plants evolved to be parasitic?  I mean, it’s so much easier to make your own energy, so why put the fate of your own survival on the small chance that you’ll find a suitable host before the food in your cotyledons run out?   It doesn’t make sense.

Then, I read further and found out that Dodders hate wheat.  It’s too good for it or something.  It won’t even touch it with a 10-foot-pole (ok, maybe it didn’t say that).  And I thought, ok…what’s wrong with wheat?  Apparently, although wheat has beta-mycrene (like the tomato does), it also has another volatile compound called (Z)-3-hexenyl acetate.  These types of compounds are generally called herbivore-induced Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) because it’s a defense mechanism against herbivore attacks.  So, my next question was: why can’t scientists engineer that stuff as a spray product to protect their crops from herbivores and Dodders?

So I searched for research articles about VOCs to see if it is currently being used as repellent (because they, the scientists, have probably thought of everything), and it turns out that not only these VOCs do repel herbivores…they attract them at the same time?!?  Now, that’s just crazy.  Why would plants release compounds that both attract AND repel?  Are they confused?  What’s the benefit of being eaten by one herbivore, but not the other?  I mean, I wouldn’t release a scent that says, “Vampires? yes, please…but absolutely NO Zombies!”

If you want to see it for yourself, here are links:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2373414/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3142417/

Prepare to be confused.

PHILOSOPHY: THE ITERATIVE DYNAMIC PROOF OF THE COMPLEX GOD

THE ITERATIVE DYNAMIC PROOF OF THE COMPLEX GOD:

How the Mandelbrot and Julia Set mathematically proves St. Thomas Aquinas’ statement that God is the starting point of every effect.

By:Karen Quinto

Written for Dr. Gary Toop (PHL 201 “Problems in Philosophy”) on July 31, 2010

————————————————————————————————————————-

I am sure it is not a unique thought that we as human beings should never know what created the universe because we ourselves are in it and are limited by it.  Because of the limitations, seeking the truth is not an easy task.   As a human being, I am often overwhelmed where to begin.  Questions seem to be the very nature of the human consciousness, the answers to which seems to formulate even more complex questions, and those questions answered creating infinitely more.

As humans, we persist in the curiosity of the metaphysical, and through reason alone, we have developed the study of natural philosophy to better understand God’s effects. This is the God that which we understand—if we observe motion present in the universe—to be analogous to the unmoved mover and the uncaused cause of every effect thereafter.  This is derived from the cosmological argument of St. Thomas Aquinas who, with the second law of thermodynamics in mind, thought of God as being the “potential energy” of the universe that created everything.  The argument of motion states that through God, the universe was created from potential into actual.  Aquinas proposes that we can better know God through his effects; after all, a potential motion can be measured through the actual motion, just as we are able to know how high a rubber ball can bounce if we knew how high it was dropped.  God’s effects, the realm of actuality, is everything that can be observed in nature and described through abstractions in mathematics and other branches of the sciences.  We see parallels of the cosmological argument most popularly in the big bang, a theory that proposes that a spontaneous explosion created the universe, expanding continuously through time.  This has been proven through the Doppler effect that describes the moving of celestial objects away from each other inferred by the wavelengths of lights.

The continuous expansion of the universe can also be described by the second law of thermodynamics known as Entropy, which states that everything in the world moves towards disorder, and towards chaos in an irreversible process, as in the case of time. Perhaps chaos is simply an abstraction of order.  It is simply a form of order that our mind cannot, because of the limits of the human intelligence, decipher.   After all, many shapes in nature have extreme complexity; shapes that exist, yet cannot be defined within simple geometry, although geometry is certainly a part of it.

I see signs of God in science where patterns emerge as soon as I make sense of them, like finding meaning where there didn’t used to be.  Berkeley put it succinctly that the world is dependent upon our mind for its existence.  When something is from a great distance, it is beyond our perception and thus cannot exist by way of our senses. Upon entering our periphery, we may sense it a little, perhaps like a dot to acknowledge its physical manifestation, but for the most part we rely heavily upon our reason, intuition and imagination to infer the nature of the object.  It seems to me that God is that which resides in the periphery, constantly within the boundary of knowing, and yet, not fully knowing.  Many philosophers have tried to explain the existence of God through mathematics, and perhaps it is because it is the only language available to humans that can best describe all the abstractions of complexity.   In order to derive meaning behind a phenomenon, we must be able to find the pattern; first, by being able to describe them, so that we can pull things that seem very far and very complex into the nearer realm of order, which are the things that we are able to describe through our senses and reason.

Reasoning is the faculty which sets humans apart from animals, and the progress we have made in the sciences to better understand ourselves is a testimony to the power of our will to reason.  Only humans can take into account the order we see in nature—patterns which we strive to discover in order to uncover more complex patterns that can be explained through the study of the sciences.  Yet nature is the part of the whole of which science is only a part, just like order is only a small part of chaos.  By language of mathematics, humans take into account the order that we see in nature, make sense of it and understand it because nature is meaningful, and so it must necessarily follow that God, who is the cause of nature must also be meaningful.

In my understanding of God, He must necessarily exist for anything in science to have meaning.  And even more evidence I see of God is the sheer complexity of things that humans cannot understand now, but may be able to decipher their pattern in due time.  He is the necessary being that remains the same throughout time and space, being unbound by it. The understanding of God as a Whom or What may vary across different interpretations (and even religions, or lack thereof), yet God is essentially that same point in the periphery.  So that in my understanding of Him, God is the potential that transforms into the actual and is simultaneously both, in the same way that light is both particles and wave as a duality (perhaps that is why many religions associate God with light).

Contingency is Aquinas’ argument that humans and the universe are “contingent” things that do not possess a necessary existence, so that we could not exist if God did not will it to be so.  This contingency argument is personified in a sub-plot of the novel Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice.  God wanted to know who He was, so He made the universe in His image to better understand Himself.  In effect: I am willed to existence by God so that I am able to conceive of Him as He conceives of me.  This iterative dynamic system of God feeding into me feeding into God feeding into me in a loop, is what I immediately knew by reason and intuition when I was introduced to the iterative dynamical system of the Mandelbrot and Julia set of complex planes.

The formula, Z —> Z² + C , is a beautiful one, akin to a mathematical story of creation.  In the beginning, there was nothing except an initial point.  The purpose or goal, was to evolve the single point into an interconnection of things that a repeating “loop” system could potentially, given the right conditions make something out of nothing.  To illustrate this in science, biological life did form from the initial combinations of nucleic acids that could potentially transform itself into DNA under the condition that it could replicate itself. This is the argument of causation of St. Aquinas, who describes God to be the starting point of every effect; the “nucleic acid” of existence.   Just as things did not appear out of nothing– because nothing can come out of nothing–God is the necessary cause of our existence.  Mandelbrot himself remarks that the interconnectedness of the Mandelbrot and Julia set is an ‘act of God’.  This is the notion of the everlasting, continuously returning something that originates from the initial point, and through the re-iteration of the system creates an infinitely connected shape that continues to feed itself.

Depending on the constant in the formula, C, the Julia Set may transform into different shapes called fractals.  For example, if the constant is zero (Z —> Z² + C) the shape of the Julia set is a perfect circle.  Other numbers conjure up shapes that seem like lightning, like clouds, like a snowflake–yet pick a different number and just as easily it turns into dust.  Mandelbrot explains that the constant, C, must be a number within the Mandelbrot Set in order for the Julia Set to be connected.  Any number outside of the Mandelbrot set will only return fractal dust, the nothingness that results when the Julia Set is disconnected.  Thus we must necessarily be inside God to be interconnected, as the Julia set is contingent upon the Mandelbrot Set to be connected.  And we are indeed an interconnected web of life emerging amidst other unconnected ‘dusts’ in the universe.   This is not such a difficult idea to explore, for we are on a living Earth surrounded by the void and vacuum of outer space.

The patterns occurring in the natural world is an overwhelming proof that Mandelbrot discovered the mathematical design of nature–the shapes of the Julia set that can only exist because the Mandelbrot set exists.  With only the iterative dynamic proof of God in mathematics, we arrive at the argument that the interconnectedness of life has a necessary origin and is contingent upon something in order to exist.  Without God, how can everything come from nothing?

COLD IN THE DAYS OF OLD (written for Afexa Life Sciences)

by Karen Quinto

(written for Afexa Life Sciences)

With the advent of modern medicine, it doesn’t matter how bad your cold gets – the pharmaceutical industry has you covered. Drug store shelves are stacked with a medley of over-the-counter, fast-acting, extra-strength, daytime, night-time, anytime remedies, be they pills, syrups, gels, gumdrops or freeze pops.

If there was ever a time to get a cold, now would be it.

But ancient civilizations didn’t have it so easy. Back in the old days, they made all kinds of whacky concoctions to cure a wide range of ailments. Relieving yourself of the cold was sometimes more painful than suffering from the cold itself.

While some were based on superstition, like those that blamed evil spirits for the illness, a handful of homemade remedies from as early as the first century BCE have medicinal properties that account for their popularity even today.

Here are some traditional ways to alleviate the cold that have passed the test of time — and of science.

In one nostril and out the other

It might look like a genie lamp, but there’s no magic wish inside. Instead, the neti pot is filled with 0.9 to 3 per cent saline solution that gets poured into one nostril and flushes out the sinus cavity before exiting the other.

Neti pot sales skyrocketed after Dr. Oz popularized it on an episode of Oprah episode in April 2007, but neti pots—a form of saline nasal irrigation therapy which rinses the sinus with saltwater—has been around since the Vedic Age. According to Dr. David Rabago and Dr. Aleksandria Zgierska from the University of Wisconsin, it works by cleansing the nasal mucous. This increases the movement of the little hair-like structures called cilia, which sweep away dust and infectious agents and trap them in the mucous lining.

The treatment has been found not only to be effective against the cold, but also against sinusitis, allergies and acute upper respiratory infections. Best of all, it is safe and has little to no side effects.

What irritates you can only make you stronger

Not only is mustard good with ketchup and pickles in your burger, it’s good for your circulation too. Brassica nigra, more commonly known as Black Mustard, is used as an irritant to encourage blood flow to areas of the body that are congested. The active ingredient, allylisothiocyanate, stimulates the immune system by bringing blood to the affected area.

Reader’s Digest “A guide to common health problems”, lists a mustard foot bath (using one tablespoon of mustard powder per litre of hot water) as one of the ways to relieve congestions from the common cold. Dr. Alfred Fogel, author of the highly acclaimed book “The Nature Doctor”, alternatively suggests the mustard plaster, a topical paste used to treat the cold, bronchitis, asthma and pneumonia. Care should be taken not to apply the paste directly to the skin because allylisothiocyanate is a potent irritant. To avoid its blistering burn, a layer of grease or salve should be applied first.

Medicinal use of mustard dates back as early as the 2nd century BCE when mustard was used as antidote for scorpion bites and other poisons. It played a significant role in battling the Yellow Fever epidemic of the 18th century when the fever meant imminent death. Nowadays, you can buy a bottle of mustard for five dollars, but during the Great Fever it was worth its weight in gold—literally.

 A leech ‘nose’ how to get the job done

Hirudotherapy, a fancy way of saying “getting sucked by a leech”, was all the rage in the Roman period. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, approved of bloodletting to drain “bad blood” out of the body.

To treat the common cold, the leech was hung off the tip of the nose like an ornament a Christmas tree. Blood was drained by the parasitic worm until it got full and fell off on its own. While it may have the same effect as mustard in combating circulation problem, having “bad blood” has nothing to do with viral infections.

People paid a high price for this misconception. Leech saliva has a protein called Hepsin, which prevents clotting when feeding on a host. If the leech detached improperly, it would leave an incurable wound and the person would bleed to death. Modern doctors have found a benefit to this property.

Dr. Karsten Knobloch, a reconstructive surgeon from Hannover Medical School in Germany, attest to the usefulness of leeches in plastic surgery and microsurgery. In a 2007 literature review, he said that leeches are still being used to naturally fuse tiny vessels together during the healing process. Applying the sucker to the affected area helps minimize clotting and encourages blood flow.

So while Hirudotherapy should be crossed off your list of cold remedies, you may want to consider it for, say, a nose job.

Soup Science 

The chicken soup needs no introduction. It is the most popular and most uncontested traditional cold remedy since the ancient Greek civilization. In the 12th century, the Egyptian Jewish physician and philosopher, Moshe ben Maimonides, wrote about the benefits of chicken soup for respiratory tract symptoms.

In 1993, Dr. Stephen Rennard put the soup through scientific scrutiny. Suspecting an anti-inflammatory value, he took his grandmother-in-law’s chicken soup recipe to the lab. Evidence shows that chicken soup inhibits neutrophils—a type of white blood cells that causes inflammation during a cold infection. Chicken soup, it turns out, calms inflammation that is characteristic of cold symptoms.

Although the study was not conclusive, the positive result was nevertheless seen not just in the chicken and not just in the vegetables but in the combination of both.

“This suggests that whole chicken soup may contain a mixture of active agents that synergize each other in order to achieve their beneficial effects,” he says.

So next time you get a cold, think about how simple your trip to the drugstore is. Whatever your grab off the shelf, just be glad someone invented it—whether two or two thousand years ago.

References:
Knobloch K, Gohritz A, Busch K, Spies M, Vogt PM. (2007). “Hirudo medicinalis-leech applications in plastic and reconstructive microsurgery–a literature review” [Article in German]. Vereinigung der Deutschen Plastischen Chirurgen. Vol. 39 (2):103-7

Papavramidou N, Christopoulou-Aletra H. (2009). “Medicinal use of leeches in the texts of ancient Greek, Roman and early Byzantine writers”. Internal Medicine Journal. Vol. 39 (9):624-7

Rennard BO, Ertl RF, Gossman GL, Robbins RA, Rennard SI. (2000). “Chicken soup inhibits neutrophil chemotaxis in vitro”. Chest. Vol. 118 (4): 1150–7.

Rabago D, Zgierska A. (2009). “Saline Nasal Irrigation for Upper Respiratory Conditions”. American Academy of Family Physician. Vol. 80 (10):1117-1119.

Porshinsky BS, Saha S, Grossman MD, Beery Ii P, Stawicki S. (2011). “Clinical uses of the medicinal leech: A practical review”. Journal of Postgraduate Medicine. Vol. 57 (1): 65-71

Vogel, A. (1991). “The nature doctor: a manual of traditional and complementary medicine (Completely new and rev. ed.)”. New Canaan, Connecticut: Keats Pub “A Guide to Common Health Problems – Cold and Flu.” Health, Food, Gardening, DIY and Money | Reader’s Digest UK. 24 June 2005. <http://www.readersdigest.co.uk/health/97-coughs-sneezes-aches-and-pains/18-common-complaints-colds.html&gt;.

PLAY-OFF BOUND (campus newspaper reporting)

The men’s volleyball team stays in the hunt for a playoff spot. Karen Quinto reports

With only eight games left in the regular season, the Ryerson’s men’s volleyball team defeated the Windsor Lancers last Saturday, after being trampled by the Western Mustangs on Jan. 8.

“We lost to Western yesterday, but Western is undefeated,” said head coach Mirek Porosa.

After Saturday’s 3-1 comeback win, the Rams, who are fighting with York, Toronto and RMC for a playoff berth, are now tied in the OUA standings with Waterloo, and only four points behind Laurier.

The Rams played a close game for most of the first set, but Porosa was forced to call a timeout after the Lancers took an 18-15 lead.

“Ryerson’s the kind of team where if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile,” said Lancer’s assistant coach Shawn Lippert after the game.

The Rams got back on track after the timeout as outside hitter Greg McDonald scored three consecutive points, including two blocks and a kill. Ryerson proceeded to take a short-lived 22-17 lead, but the Lancers responded by scoring eight consecutive points, as they won the first set 25-22.

Windsor was consistently ahead in the second set until Porosa called upon their Libero and team captain Robby Earl to take control of the game. Earl served up an ace that started the comeback and McDonald recorded two kills to help the Ram win the set 25-23.

That was the inch that became a mile.

The Rams kept their spirits up throughout the third set despite a rough start put them behind 4-0. Ryerson took charge of the game with a commanding 13-7 lead, thanks to middle blocker Roman Kabanov and outside hitter Chris McLaughlin.

While Windsor began closing in on Ryerson’s lead, a clutch block from Kabanov sealed the set for the Rams who were leading the game 2-1.

“We weren’t hungry to win, “ Windsor captain and setter Adam Prieur explained. “We feel that Ryerson is fighting to make it to the playoffs and they were hungry to win.”

That hunger persisted throughout the fourth set as successful serves by outside hitter Luka Milosevic and timely blocks by setter Aleksa Miladinovic got the team off to a quick start. The game became extremely tense midway through the set as Windsor crept up through a series of bad serves and costly errors by the Rams. Those errors quickly built up to a 19-19 tie. However Kabanov and McDonald stepped it up, paving the way to a victory as they ended the set 25-22, winning the game with a three sets to one.

“Ryerson is better than what they say on paper,” said Windsor head coach Huub Kemmere.

The Rams will play their next game against York Friday night at Kerr Hall.

Photo: Stephen Akassim

FROM VARSITY SPORTS TO LAB REPORTS

While many athletes are unfairly labelled as dumb jocks, many Ryerson athletes combine brain and brawn to dispel that stereotype as true student-athletes

by: Rob Moysey and Karen Quinto

Robby Earl is like any other science student at Ryerson: he has a boatload of exams to study for and a handful of assignments due each week.  But while his fellow students are holed up in their dorm rooms knocking back energy drinks and drowning in their notes, Earl is in the Kerr Hall gym practicing his digs and volleys.

The second-year contemporary science major and captain of the men’s volleyball team is the poster boy of a unique brand of athlete at Ryerson: those that buck the stereotypes of the dumb jock and the awkward nerd simultaneously by performing at a high level both on the court and in the classroom.

The stereotypes are fixtures of our culture: athletes are portrayed as beer chugging, blonde-dating neanderthals, while nerds are book reading, DDR-playing pipsqueaks.  But being an athlete is no easy feat at Ryerson: all athletes must maintain at least a 2.3 GPA to be eligible to play.  If they slip below that, they wind upon probation until they boost their grades. Add to that four to six weekly practices and at least one — but up to three — games per week, and it’s a heavy burden to bear.  It’s tough for any student-athlete,but particularly challenging for the16 that are in science-related programs.

“It’s pretty demanding,” said Jordan Hill, a rookie forward for the women basketball team and a first-year aerospace engineering student.“I don’t do very much else besides school and basketball. You’d have to be crazy [to do more than that]. You’d have to not sleep.”

Though common sense might lead to the conclusion that these athlete shave to trade in-class excellence for on-court success, a study in IDEA Fitness Journal suggests otherwise. The study found people who exercise three to four times a week reported higher job performance.

“Sometimes when I am studying really hard and I have to go to practice,when I come back I am way more focused. I feel so much better,” Hill said.

The tight schedule athletes face forces them to manage their time much more efficiently. That’s why Earl can handle the extra responsibilities of being team captain while maintaining a 4.26 GPA.“You know you have certain blocks of time you know that you have to study, whereas if you didn’t have that, you’d just procrastinate and not study,” said Hill.

The transition to an extremely jam-packed schedule comes easier to some than others. Bjorn Michaelsen,a first-year forward for the men’s basketball team and a mechanical engineering student, found that he had to create a strict routine in order to balance school and sports.“We usually have practice at nine,so I study early in the morning, go to class, then go to practice, and if I am a little bit more energetic, I will study after,” he said.

But no matter how well they manage their schedule, there is always spillover between school and sports: it’s an inevitability of bouncing back and forth between class, practice, and games.

“Sometimes that’s what’s hard about practices: when I study right before and I’ve got all those numbers in my head…[it’s hard] to focus on basketball. And sometimes when you’re studying, you’re thinking about the game,” he said.

While many students escape the confines of school-related stress on the weekends, these student-athletes often don’t get that chance.“Seeing friends on the weekends…you don’t even have weekends!” said Earl. “There are three things in life and you can only do two really well:school, sports, and social life. If you try to do all three, you’ll never be at the top. I don’t think everyone can do it and I don’t think everyone would want to do it.”

 

PHOTO: ROB MOYSEY