Science Snippets
May 25th, 2025 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Andalusians from Jaén, proud olive growers, tell me in good conscience who, who grew the olive trees? Miguel Hernandez Some of the miracles my mother dreamed of became reality during her life: the polio vaccine, too late for my young brother but on time for the many millions saved from paralysis and death. Vaccines were made possible by centuries of science and medicine. The polio vaccine prevented millions of deaths and so much misery. Some people like to imagine the old days, when humans were surrounded by nature and life was easy. Those times never existed, but people can imagine anything they want when they don’t learn from the…
April 9th, 2025 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
What you don’t know can kill you, especially when quacks are involved. In 1953, there was no vaccine for polio. Many families, including mine, were destroyed by the effects of this virus. The virus caused physical defects in their victims’ extremities and more, caused by irreparable damage to their neuromuscular systems. My mother tried to defend us from the virus with camphor hanging in small bags from our necks because that’s all that there was. In 2025, if you live in a country that can afford to stock a vaccine, you have no excuse to have your kids and your family destroyed by this virus. Or do you? Are conspiracy…
October 9th, 2024 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Scientists have struggled for more than 50 years to solve what was called “the protein folding problem.” Proteins are complicated, and elucidating their structure used to take decades and even longer to understand how they work. That is still true, but AI has been helpful. Why is protein folding important? We may think DNA is complicated, but it’s not as complicated as a protein. DNA, whatever its origin and sequence, folds in space in a similar manner, as shown by Watson, Crick and Wilkins (1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Rosalind Franklin had already died). Remember the double helix? Now look at those pretty models of proteins you see…
October 7th, 2024 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
What does it mean? Science is a process. We learn as we research, and life is complicated. When I started college in 1966, it wasn’t even clear to me how many chromosomes there were in a human cell. Maybe it was because old textbooks still circulated with the old number, 48. Actually, Joe Hin Tjio and Albert Levan reported in 1956 that the correct human chromosome number was 46, not 48, as was supposedly established some three decades earlier. Textbooks are full of errors. Gene regulation determines differences between types of cells, and if it goes off track, it can lead to diseases such as cancer, diabetes, or autoimmunity. Researchers…
April 15th, 2024 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
ROS can destroy everything they find: proteins, DNA, lipids, and life. The environment provides plenty of ROS* (reactive oxygen species), but so does your body! How? Respiration and mitochondria are the main suppliers of usable energy to fulfill all our needs. They produce energy by extracting it from foodstuffs, and electron transport plays a big part in this. However, the electron transport process, a marvel of life, is far from perfect, and ROS* are formed. Our body has the machinery to deal with ROS*, acquired during millions of years of evolution in an oxygen-containing atmosphere. But this machinery, just like everything else in our bodies, ages as we age. Why…
April 9th, 2024 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
TIU: Top It UpWhat’s this? As our skin ages, there will be two significant changes: a decrease in the production of growth factors and a fall in the supply of nutrients from the rest of the body. This means that cell division will slow down due to a lack of instructions to divide and the wherewithal to allow cells to grow and divide. This is the double whammy that will accelerate skin aging. You will not notice a difference in your teen years, but you may when you reach your twenties and certainly in your thirties. What will you see? Thinning of the skin, wrinkles, laxity. Oral vitamins will not…
February 4th, 2024 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
I am happy to report that much of the buzz about cannabidiol (CBD) is fact, at least the part that concerns its skin benefits. Let’s look into the science of CBD and the science of skin and their interaction. The most important thing? There are receptors in the skin that recognize CBD. The skin is one of the many organs equipped with the endocannabinoid system. You may have heard about anandamine. Discovered by Raphael Mechoulam in 1992, this is one excellent detective story. He said: if humans have receptors for cannabinoids CB1, and CB2, there has to be a natural chemical in the body that binds to those receptors. Mechoulam…
November 22nd, 2023 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
It seems that entire companies are started in the name of very old chemicals renamed and branded as “first-of-its-kind anti-aging ingredient.” It bothers me as much (or a bit more) than when we first started Skin Actives. Skin Actives is a company that is proudly based on scientific evidence. So, when silly (greedy?) people extract a name from the proverbial magician hat and proclaim it ” first of its kind anti-aging ingredient,” it irritates me. Decades ago, it was said of me that I don’t suffer fools gladly, and aging has not added to my patience. This “newly” discovered ingredient was discovered in 1885 by the German physician Ludwig Brieger. …
October 29th, 2023 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
What a weird title! Who could be in favor of menopause? I am, now. It took me a few years to change my mind. I was very much against. Why did I change my mind? I first fought menopause, but eventually, I had no choice but to accept it. I have now experienced it and recognize the many resources to counteract the “cons” while enjoying the pros. I also wish I hadn’t fought it in the first place. In a civilization that celebrates youth, menopause is anathema. After menopause, women can no longer bear children, and they lose the attributes that make them sexually attractive to the males of the…
October 2nd, 2023 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
I remember the relief I felt when I got my first Covid vaccine. At the time, people were dying by the thousands, and many of us were touched by the effects of the nasty virus. Vaccines are one of the most important scientific inventions, and they have increased, by decades, the life expectancy of people in countries that use them. I remember what was like NOT having a vaccine when polio hit in the 1950s. Eventually, a Nobel Prize (1954) went to Enders, Weller, and Robbins for innovations that made the development of Sabin’s oral polio vaccine possible. When I was a child, I received both vaccines, Salk’s and Sabin’s,…
April 20th, 2023 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Of course! Our body is very complicated and any publications explaining why something happens will always be a partial explanation. This is particularly true for aging (so many things go wrong) and with stem cells, because they are so flexible. In the past, I posted the news that two enzymes crucial to the synthesis of melanin were affected in the hair follicle making grey hair. The following is from my book Following the discovery that follicles lacking in two crucial antioxidant enzymes make gray-white hair, we added these two enzymes to our Hair Care Serum that should help protect your scalp and prevent the loss of hair color. Gray hair…
October 2nd, 2022 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Revela ingredients: Water, Denatured Ethanol, Propylene Glycol, Glycerin, Propanediol, Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Juice, Caffeine, Serenoa Serrulata (Saw Palmetto) Extract, Apple Extract, Niacin, L-Lysine, ProCelinyl (furanyl methylthio methyl sulfanyl triazole), Biotin, L-Methionine, Inositol, Thiamine HCI (Vitamin B1), Xanthan Gum, Phenoxyethanol, Ethylhexylglycerin, Pantothenic Acid (Vitamin B5). If you are about to buy Revela because you think that $90 is all you can lose, think again. Nobody knows what this novel chemical can do to a human body because humans had never encountered it before it was created and added to these products. The loophole in medicine/cosmetics, as seen by the FDA is a temptation to people wanting to make a fast buck.…
September 28th, 2022 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Using information from folk medicine and old pharmacology, Julius elucidated what happens when our bodies encounter chili peppers. In 1997, Julius and his colleagues cloned and characterized the transient receptor potential V1 (TRPV1), the molecule that detects capsaicin, the chemical in chili peppers that makes them “hot.” They found that TRPV1 also detects noxious heat (thermoception). TRPV1 is part of a large family of structurally related transient receptor potential (TRP) cation channels. Animals lacking TRPV1 lose sensitivity to noxious heat and capsaicin. It may seem obvious, but these receptors don’t exist simply to allow us to enjoy Mexican food; they are responsible for a body function that allows us to…
August 21st, 2022 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
It seems that in life, everything looks like a biphasic curve. Train hard, and you will get fitter and strengthen your muscles. Train too hard, and you will be in trouble; it’s called “overtraining.” We recognize tiredness and fatigue but don’t know how it works. Fatigue is often described by patients as a lack of energy, mental or physical tiredness, diminished endurance, and prolonged recovery after physical activity. The mechanisms underlying persistent fatigue are not well understood; however, mitochondrial disease causes fatigue, making mitochondrial dysfunction the likely biological mechanism for fatigue. The primary source of fatigue and tiredness is that mitochondria, the engines that provide energy to the cells, are…
August 5th, 2022 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
O ATP! I could write poems to ATP, sing to it, or maybe build a sculpture! It’s the most beautiful molecule in the world. Or maybe Rubisco is, or chlorophyll. I have many favorites. But ATP is the energy currency of life. Life “runs” on ATP, the energy that allows cells to make order out of disorder and build molecules using what, ultimately, it’s the sun’s energy. But let’s keep it simple: our cells make ATP out of the food we eat. Our skin uses ATP to do almost everything, to keep everything going, make new cells, and keep going for almost 100 years. Figure: the ultimate energy currency,…
July 4th, 2022 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
INCI Name:Saccharide Isomerate (and) Aqua (and) Citric Acid (and) Sodium Citrate The consumer may see nothing strange in this ingredient list, but the chemist or biochemist or biologist will ask “what on earth is saccharide isomerate”. If you are Hannah you will think that you must have forgotten something important because I used to know everything about sugars and polysaccharides. Is it age? No. It’s not my age. Saccharide isomerate is an invention of the ingredients industry, great at pulling names out of the proverbial magic hat. Saccharide isomerate is a soup, a mix of unknown sugars made in the laboratory. And, as its composition is unknown, it can’t be…
June 2nd, 2022 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Her life reads like a TV series, how come nobody produced it yet? In fact, there was both a musical and a comedy inspired by her life. Chaja Rubinstein was born in 1870 to a Polish Jewish family. She was lucky to be was born in a city, Krakow (Lesser Poland) then part of the Austria-Hungary empire, at a time when there was some tolerance towards minorities. She had a good education and even started medical school. The only part that she liked was labwork and not dealing with illness and death. Late in the 19th-century doctors did not have many tools, and being a doctor was not a satisfying…
January 4th, 2022 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
What is sustainability? It is a relatively new word, plus its meaning has been changing with time. Originally, “sustainability” meant making such use of natural, renewable resources like a forest so that people could continue to rely on their yields in the long term. In other words, using a resource in such a way that it never runs out. Nowadays it means keeping the balance between environment, equity, and economy. In any of its uses, it’s an admirable aim and looks great in advertising. Because the meaning of the word changes with the source, it’s a good idea to ask what the person (or the advertiser) means by it. How…
December 28th, 2021 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Robert H. Grubbs (1942-2021), who shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in chemistry said “there was great joy in making new molecules”. An efficient method of carbon-carbon double bond formation was uncovered over 50 years ago when scientists Robert Grubbs, Yves Chauvin, and Richard Schrock began their pioneering research into metal-catalyzed reactions. Their catalytic reaction is known as olefin (or alkene) metathesis. Schrock discovered that two metals, tungsten, and molybdenum, were effective catalysts in producing metathesis, which means “changing places.” The metals caused carbon bonds in molecules to break apart and then rearrange themselves in different ways, creating new chemical bonds. In 1992, Dr. Grubbs improved the process by demonstrating that…
December 20th, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
2+2=4 One can pretend that reality does not exist but then a virus reminds us that it does. 2020 has been a tough year for all of us, and too tough for some. I feel lucky that I did not lose anybody to Covid19 and that a vaccine is around the corner, less than a year after we found out about the new virus. Having read the books by Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague, in 1994, and Betrayal of Trust, in 2001, I was not surprised when the pandemic came. I was, however, dismayed by the lack of awareness of many about what the virus was about to do to…