Saad's Stories

Recently I was introduced to a blog called FutureDerm, where one Nicki Zevola reviews beauty products. And I want to recommend her blog to anyone who cares about hair and skin products. I will use three of her recent posts to illustrate why I’m recommending it.

1) In this post about SPF makeup, she explains why the SPF rating on the product label doesn’t match its performance in real life:

…scientists test facial powders to determine SPF in a manner mandated by the FDA, assuming that 2mg of product will be used per cm² of skin. The average face is about 600cm² (although that varies from person to person, of course), meaning that a person needs to apply about 1.2g of facial powder to get the SPF stated on the product’s label. However, most women only apply about 0.085g of powder at a time – fourteen times less than you need to get the SPF listed on the package!

2) On whether retinol creams are likely to break down over time:

Other studies, such as this 2004 study in the Journal of Raman Spectroscopy, have shown retinol also becomes unstable in the presence of too much oxygen.  So both light and air cause retinol to break down into an oxidized species.

After a month of use, your retinol cream will undoubtedly have less potency than when it is first opened.  That’s just the nature of the beast, sorry.  However, if your retinol cream contains other antioxidants, is encapsulated in liposomes, or packaged in a light-protective container, then your retinol will have degraded far less than otherwise. … I would also add that an airtight pump, like in Green Cream or Skinceuticals Retinol Creams, are excellent choices.

3) In this review of a Proactiv mask, she addresses the ingredients and why they might be effective at improving skin:

Kaolin, a hydrated silicate of aluminum, has been established as an effective adsorbent for hundreds of years.  Kaolin has long been used to treat skin erythema, eczema, and inflammatory skin disorders.  It is an adsorbent ingredient that has been proven to absorb excess oil on the skin, as mentioned in The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.  In fact, kaolin is so adsorbent makes me hesitant to recommend this to anyone with dry skin!

Sulfur is an important mineral component of vitamin B, collagen, keratin, and several amino acids.  According to The Encyclopedia of Skin and Skin Disorders, sulfur is thought to slow bacterial growth as it dissolves the top layer of the skin and slows oil-gland activity within the skin.

What I like about her content is that she doesn’t limit it to reviewing her experience with a product. She cites a fair amount of scientific research that ties a product’s performance to its ingredients and method of formulation. And in #2, she proposes products that address an unavoidable issue with a key ingredient. This appeals to the scientist in me, and for anyone, this makes her blog a useful repository to predict how other products with similar ingredients might function. As far as how compounds like retinol degrade, I’m familiar with that from my line of work. I love being able to read stuff like this because it expands my thinking on how the science can be extended toward designing cool and useful products. Yes, even cosmetics.

And she keeps the FutureDerm blog going while handling the little side gig of being a medical student at Pitt. Well done.

(Picture from UK’s Telegraph)

I decided to get McDonalds for lunch at the Pittsburgh airport before my flight home for Thanksgiving. Looking out the window at the airplanes while eating, I was reminded of the story where one airline saved $40,000 a year simply by removing the olive from its salads [1]. Looking back at my food, I thought… Hmm, what if McDs cut back on their fries by some tiny amount, so small that the customer wouldn’t notice it readily? And kept sale prices the same, so a cutback here = added profit.

Let’s say the cutback is by 5% (1/20th of the total) – how does this work out in terms of numbers?

McDonalds sells 9 million lbs of potatoes per day. Over 365 days, that works out to roughly 3 billion pounds of potatoes in a year. A quick look at this list of spot prices suggests that McDs can get their potatoes at $11 for a 50 lb crate. (It’s possible their scale lets them negotiate even lower prices.) $11 for 50 lbs = $0.22/lb. This means that McDs buys $660 million of potatoes each year.

So, 5% of that amount = $33 million

Pretty huge number. Does it matter to their operation? Read more…

The future is now, at least when it comes to flexible circuit materials in consumer electronics.  Mark Anderson of IEEE Spectrum visited the new Plastic Logic cleanroom in Germany, where a 7-millimeter thin competitor to the Amazon Kindle will be produced.  Here is one reason why plastic electronics will be a major player:

In his corner office at the Dresden facility, Konrad Herre, Plastic Logic’s vice president of manufacturing, gave a simple demonstration highlighting one benefit of plastic electronics.  “You easily can do this,” he says as he smashes his fist onto the Reader’s 22-by-28-centimeter flexible screen and backplane, bashing it with a force that would shatter any liquid-crystal display or slice of silicon. “It doesn’t break, although it’s a big display.”

Besides offering the toughness that a brittle material like silicon does not, the polymer circuitry can be deposited and patterned much more rapidly and with less complex equipment than the metal wires and oxide layers used in conventional fabrication.  Of course, speed is sacrificed when going from silicon transistors to organic transistors, but for an application like the E-reader, delivering a product with toughness at low cost should take precedence.

The cleanroom photograph provided by the story shows nothing unusual but I would love to visit the facility to see these in action:

Perhaps most immediately conspicuous about Plastic Logic’s clean room is the fleet of boxy automatic guided vehicles (AGVs)—robots that lead each motherglass through some 55 of the approximately 80 steps it takes to make the Reader’s display module. Each AGV serves as the robotic shepherd that brings its batch of motherglass from automated station to automated station. And whenever the AGVs are in motion—down “the Autobahn,” as the workers call the clean room’s main drag—the robots play bleepy melodies that warn workers to stand clear.

If we had these back at Hopkins, when I was making microfluidics for an Instrumentation class project, I would have programmed them to whistle the tune I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.