This is beautiful.

It was Astronomy Picture of the Day on Sunday (22/5/11.) Go to the site to see it in its full glory.

It’s a composite view of Jupiter’s moon, Io, taken by the Galileo spacecraft. You can see a blue coloured volcanic plume at the top of the scene. There is another plume – known by the name Prometheus – right in the centre. It’s ring shaped and is rising directly towards the camera. The striking yellow and red patches on Io’s surface are due to the sulphur spewed out by the volcanoes. Because of that Io looks like a semi-precious stone.

As an SF reader and writer I was of course intrigued by the recent report in Science that a bacterium has been found that uses arsenic instead of phosphorus in its cell mechanisms. As a chemist, though, I was reasonably underwhelmed. While it is true that carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur and phosphorus are the six elements whose atoms are needed by most living things on Earth – trace quantities of other elements’ atoms are of course necessary for the full range of operation, iron in the haemoglobin of red blood cells for example – it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that a particular organism would be able to substitute atoms of a similar element for one or other of these for certain purposes; especially if that organism lived in an extreme environment. Arsenic for phosphorus is not such a big jump. They are both in the same group of the Periodic Table, one directly above the other, and while arsenic is usually poisonous, cells working in an arsenic rich environment might be thought to be able to develop tolerance. It’s only a step from that to actually utilising the stuff. The reseachers seem to have given the organism concerned little choice in the matter, as the BBC report makes clear.

In all other respects it seems the biology of the bacterium is entirely on a par with the rest of life on Earth, some of which can live in all sorts of weird places.

So not alien, then, despite some of the hype. See Wired.

What would be really interesting would be if someone found a non-carbon based organism.

Don’t hold your breath.

Apart from anything else I don’t know if anyone’s looking – or what to look for if they did.

I was checking my blog’s stats earlier this week.

It never fails to amaze me that a high number of visits to this blog seem to arise from my post about Mary Campbell Smith’s poem The Boy In The Train.

There are lots of hits for Art Deco too, which actually tend to predominate.

However what caught my eye this time was someone looking for the spelling of sulphur.

I accessed the search page they’d used and found this blog entry. Its last line is a beauty.

I do hope Jon Edwards from the RSC has looked at it (and at my reply to his comment on my take on the subject here.)

I note also that I was 22^nd equal in the general blog category in the Scotblog Awards and 67^th equal overall. Four votes plus a panel nomination was all that took. (I’ll need to tout for votes next year.)

For some time now The Royal Society of Chemistry, which is obviously a British organisation, has recommended the use of sulfur as the spelling for sulphur. (This has the knock on effect of also meaning using the forms sulfate and sulfite for naming compounds containing respectively the sulphate and sulphite ions; or hydrogensulfite and hydrogensulfate for what before more systematic naming came about used to be known as the bisulphite and bisulphate ions.)

I have now learned that the SQA, the Scottish Qualifications Authority, (my italics) – again domiciled within these islands – will also be taking up this egregious practice.

The imposition is of course an American usage and is I suppose being introduced on the grounds that sulphur is easier to spell this way. But is it?

I agree that Americans – and increasingly we Brits – do write fantasy for phantasy but on this side of the Atlantic we do still tend to cling on to phantasm rather than fantasm.

Yet do Americans write of fotografs or fotons? They seem to manage those all right while using ph.

What is so special about sulphur that singles it out for this treatment?

And why not go the whole hog, here, and spell it sulfer to make it more like it sounds?

I do admit some people confuse it with silver – though since silver is a greyish metal and sulphur a yellow non-metal I can’t for the life of me see why. I think the “new” spelling will only make such confusion worse, though.

But whatever next?

Will we be forced to adopt aluminum?

Can we perhaps look forward to spelling the main ingredient of carbolic soap as fenol? Or the acid-alkali indicator as fenolfthalein?

Will element number 15 be known in the future as fosforus? (No, of course not. Its symbol is P and it only ever gets confused with potassium – which for historical reasons has the symbol K. F is in any case already taken as the symbol for fluorine.)

It’s all nonsense. Stop it.

Now.

I for one will not be changing my spelling practices.

Accept no substitute. Stand up for ph.