To get you in the mood, David Bianculli of the public radio show Fresh Air interviewed Breaking Bad director Vince Gilligan on Tuesday. And here’s a teaser from AMC:

For those who haven’t watched past seasons, it looks like AMC is once again doing a marathon of previous shows over the weekend leading up to the season premiere.

The university announced the board of inquiry’s results in September 2009 but it was prevented from releasing the full report publically by a court order from the graduate student involved. According to a post today on the ETH website: “The Court has now ruled, in an initial decision taken at the end of December 2009, that ETH Zurich may in principle publish the export report but only in such an anonymised form “that no conclusions can be drawn about the dissertation or the identity of the complainant”.”

You have to go to the university’s German site to access the report. The blacked out lines are actually multicolor and here is the legend: Blue = PhD Student, green = molecule 1, yellow = molecule 2, black = miscellaneous, red and grey = additional members of the research group.

The basic conclusion from the board of inquiry: “The only credible explanation is manipulation of the data.” They finger the graduate student and vindicate Chen.

Some parts of the 22-page document are dry, but in general it is well-written and shows a measured and comprehensive analysis by the scientific board of inquiry. It also gives insight into how such investigations proceed…

The candidate should be a highly motivated student or recent graduate with demonstrated interest in science writing and at least a bachelor’s degree in chemistry or a related field. The intern will have a chance to write bylined news and feature stories for publication in C&EN. We offer a $1500 monthly stipend for three months. The intern ideally will be based in our Washington, DC, headquarters; however, exceptional candidates unable to relocate may be considered. Starting and ending dates are flexible.

Click here for details on how to apply. Deadline for applications is Feb 22, 2010.

Instead, I’ll leave you with a reprise of “The Nano Song,” for inspiration:

The Nano Song from nanomonster on Vimeo.

Taking place in a renovated water pumping station in the middle of the former so-called death strip, the no-mans land that abutted the Berlin Wall, a variety of top researchers from the sciences and humanities described the “walls” which were falling or which needed to fall in their area of research. The organizers had also managed to book German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is a scientist-turned-politician from the former GDR (more below). Although no late-breaking new discoveries were announced, the conference provided a fascinating overview of research in a real potpourri of great topics: vaccines for neglected diseases like malaria and TB, three-dimensional televisions, how to make concrete less polluting, and how researchers are cracking the secrets of ancient civilizations , the origin of Homo sapiens. We also heard from Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general of CERN, about the Large Hadron Collider (which will hopefully start pumping out data one of these days) and from Norbert Holtkamp, who heads Iter, the fusion energy transnational research organization that originated during a 1985 conversation between Gorbachev and Reagan.

But the conference’s special guest was Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, who knows a lot about falling walls. She’s Germany’s first female head of state, and also the first from the former Communist GDR, where she had worked at a physical chemistry research institute before the Berlin Wall came down. She said that the collapse of the Berlin Wall, “changed my life completely but it did not put a damper on my love of science.”

Merkel talked about the chasm many GDR scientists used to feel between their daily work–which required an open, inquisitive and challenging mind–and their daily lives–in which an unquestioning loyalty to the Communist Party was expected. But “you can’t tell people to start thinking in the morning and then to stop [after work],” she said.

Scientists could also “be a role model for politicians,” Merkel said. She explained that every day scientists aim for the seemingly impossible–and sometimes achieve it with breakthrough discoveries. This in itself should serve as inspiration for those faced by enormous challenges such as peace in the Middle East, or the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the impossible can sometimes be made possible, she added.

Then Merkel was whisked off by her handlers to walk across Berlin’s Bornholmer bridge, where she had joined the crowds 20 years ago that pushed border guards to allow passage to West Berlin, part of the sequence of events that led to the Berlin Wall’s collapse (Check out the footage I posted here). The rest of us learned about other new walls that need to come down…

Now that proper containment of your coughing and sneezing has become an even more urgent duty in the name of public health (into the crook of the elbow and not in my general direction please!), the unique views that fluid dynamics researcher Gary Settles has on what forcefully comes out of human facial apertures could prove especially valuable.

Think of the wavy, fluidic appearance of the gas coming out of a truck’s exhaust pipe or the mirage-like shimmer of the air above hot pavement, and you are getting into the physics behind one of Settle’s techniques: schlieren optical analysis, whose roots go back to the 17th century microscopy pioneer Robert Hooke and whose name derives from the German word for streaks.

Although the schlieren optical technique Settles deploys is usually more apropos for physics and engineering studies, it also has the potential to reveal chemical phenomena such as chemical plumes from concealed weapons (if they are volatile enough), he tells C&EN. “To understand chemical trace sensing you need to see how the air is moving, usually by way of thermal plumes,” Settles says. “This naturally brings together fields such as analytical chemistry, fluid dynamics, and optics.”

Tracing expelled air from coughing isn’t exactly chemistry, but in these pandemically-minded days, it sure is timely. Using a one-meter government surplus telescope mirror that he purchased for $3000 in 1981 (new today they go for at least $80,000), Settles took a look at how medical masks affect the way a human cough—the carrier of minuscule infectious agents such as H1NI viruses and the ones that cause tuberculosis, chickenpox and measles—infiltrates the nearby airspace. The physics key to their schlieren optics study, Settles and his colleagues at Penn State and the National University of Singapore, write in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface (doi: 10.1098/rsif.2009.0295.focus), is that “it renders visible the optical phase gradients owing to real-time changes in air temperature.”

Shown above is a set of images comparing the trajectories of normally invisible plumes coughs from a cougher without a mask, wearing a standard surgical mask, or wearing a higher-end version known as the N95 mask that has a tighter fit. The conclusions the researchers make from their images, including video records, have both intuitive and nonintuitive components. With no mask, a cough plume rushes outward at a downer angle of roughly 30º, producing a turbulent jet that does a good job of distributing whatever pathogenic payload the cougher might have to offer. The standard mask is best at thwarting the forward motion, but its loose fit means that the roughly 2 liters of expelled gas volume leaks well out of the tops and sides. The tighter N95 mask leaks out of the sides less, but pressure builds more inside, resulting in more of the ejected forcing itself straight through into a slow moving forward-moving front of potentially eminently avoidable air. In the latter case, the researchers point out, that forward moving front quickly gets swept up into “general motion of the cougher’s human thermal plume.”

Compared to coughing, sneezing, breathing and talking, the researchers note that others have suggested that singing “may be a particularly effective means of transmitting airborne infection.” This perhaps serves up a hint to the State Department and Department of Homeland Security: watch for any odd singing-based gestures of international détente, say, an offer by the North Koreans to send over a ten-thousand person choral group. Also noted in the Interface paper is that “different languages may have different levels of risk for producing potentially infectious exhaled aerosols,” a conjecture that the researchers note could be investigated with “the real-time non-invasive schlieren imaging technique.”