Archive by date | August 2006

Gold medal

A big conference just isn’t a big conference without a lot of handing out of medals. So here’s congrats to Jonathan Nitschke of the University of Geneva, for winning the European Young Chemist’s award. He got an IOU from the Italian Chemical Society for 1,800 €, and a nice gold medal. Lee Cronin promised me that if he didn’t win, he would get up and shout ’It’s rigged! It’s rigged!‘, but unfortunately, he got one of the silver medals, and so we didn’t get to see a temper tantrum in the tent.  Read more

Quite a jar

Analytical chemists won’t run out of work any time soon. The world is reassuringly full of unknowns. Perhaps less reassuring is the nature of some of these unknowns. Koni Grob at the Kantonales Laboratory in Zurich, which he calls ‘a nano FDA’, has been looking at the compounds that food packages shed into the food we eat. His most recent focus has been on the plastic gaskets found inside jar lids. He finds that when oil–like that in tomato sauce, for example-touches these gaskets, all sorts of known and unknown things leach out into the food.  Read more