What is the very best way to improve science education? Great teachers, of course.

And a terrific way to encourage such teachers is to give them public recognition for their inspiration, perspiration, and occasional desperation.

One of the most visible of such recognitions is the annual award of the U.S. Professors of the Year, jointly sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Last year there were 50 such winners, and FOUR were professors of chemistry.

Getting 8% of the awards for a single discipline is stunningly good, but perhaps we can do even better in 2009. The deadline for nomination is April 17, so if you know of a deserving professor you can get nomination materials at http://www.usprofessorsoftheyear.org.

Go Chemists!

You may not have spent much time wondering how mosquitoes attract mates. Me neither, although I appreciate that nobody would miss these pesky insects at picnics and other such occasions.

And if mosquitoes couldn’t reproduce, they also couldn’t spread diseases like malaria, yellow fever, and dengue.

Thanks to new work from Cornell, we now know a bit more about the mysteries of mosquito sex life (Science [20 Feb 2009] 1077–1079). The gist is that males and females announce each other’s lusty presence by adjusting their familiar and annoying buzzing sound. This is done by modulating wing-beat frequency—not to the fundamental of either gender, but to a shared overtone of each.

 (If you’re curious, it’s 400 Hz for the ladies, 600 Hz for the guys, and 1200 Hz when they want to get together).

Aside from intrinsic scientific interest, there is also the appealing conclusion that parties get the best results not when they insist on doing things their way, but when they yield to compromise.

Humans figured this out about mosquitoes, but I wonder if we’ll do any better applying it to ourselves.

Nearly everyone has heard the cliché that oil and water don’t mix. And like all clichés, it is grounded in a fundamental reality, in this case the chemical notion that lipophilic and hydrophilic substances are immiscible.

But oil and water occur together in a very common way in most of our lives: bottled water.

The polyethylene terephthalate that comprises the vast majority of plastic water bottles is a petroleum-based product. Also, the production of bottled water uses oil for the energy requirements of making, packaging, transporting, chilling, using, and recycling the plastic containers.

Takes a lot of oil to bring you your water, both in the making and in the containing.

A recent publication by Gleick and Cooley of the Pacific Institute analyzes the energy implications of bottled water (Environmental Research Letters 4 [2009], 1–6). The paper develops an “energy footprint” for the various production steps listed above.

The main conclusion? In most cases, transport dominates all the other steps in energy costs.

Naturally, the question arises: is it sensible to be using non-renewable oil resources to produce bottled water? To be sure, the product is a convenience. But if you consider that nearly half of bottled water comes from tap water with an additional purification step, it seems a luxury we might easily do without.

Changing our habits won’t be easy though, since bottled water sales eclipse both beer and milk. So I’d say safeguard the beer and milk, but don’t try to mix oil and water.

All of us experience fear from time to time. Fear of heights, fear of fire, fear of financial-market chaos: all are reasonable emotions grounded in avoiding danger.

In fact psychologists say that once this type of emotional memory is established, it lasts forever and doesn’t have to be recreated every time the danger reappears.

Some fearful memories are not productive, though, and can lead to emotional problems like constant recall of dreadful events or posttraumatic stress disorder. But what if you could create a drug that tamped down the impact of such debilitating memories?

We may already have such a molecule–propranolol.

Propranolol is a chemical in the drug class called beta-blockers. Its primary use is in the treatment of high blood pressure, but it also has proven activity in the prevention of migraines in children.

New research from the University of Amsterdam suggests that propranolol can ease the fear reaction when a disturbing memory is recalled (Nature Neuroscience, published online [15 February 2009], doi:10.1038/nn.2271). In effect, the drug blocks the emotional component of the memory but leaves the memory itself intact.

If you are curious about how such experiments are done on humans, you should read the paper. To tease your curiosity, it has to do with spiders and electrical shocks, both of which are probably very effective at eliciting your own fear emotion.