Archive by category | European Chemistry Congress

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

Bon bons of interesting chemistry

– Kosuke Yoshida of Tokai University in Shizuoka, Japan has found a marine microalga, with the handsome name Nannochloropsis oculata, that can be trained to chop the noxious chemical formaldehyde into relatively benign ethyl formate. Yoshida is interested in using the trained strain to mitigate formaldehyde used to control parasites that live on fish gills in aquaculture.  Read more

Su Doku goes periodic

Su Doku, the number game that is sweeping the world, has been adapted by the Royal Society of Chemistry into a puzzle where each square must have only one of nine elements listed at the bottom of the page. The play is exactly the same as the digit version, except that one contemplates the likes of lanthanum and cerium while one plays. Check it out at www.rsc.org/puzzle.  Read more

Chemical Darwinism

The big tent where we saw the folk dancers was packed this morning for Jean Marie Lehn’s plenary on self-organizing systems. I heard lots of ebullient murmuring on the way out, so I think it went well, though some of it may have been the celebrity-induced glow of those who have just heard a Nobel laureate speak.  Read more

I heart food chemistry

I heart food chemistry, and for more than one reason. First of all, it is easy to get into the science when you can immediately relate it to cheese or grapes or Parma ham or something nummy like that. And secondly, it demonstrates how seriously we take the pleasure of eating. Much of food chemistry is concerned with ensuring that when we decide to spend an evening eating bon bons and drinking champagne in the bath our chocolate is not adulterated with inferior cocoa butter fat equivalents and our champagne is actually from Champagne.  Read more

Panacea in the water?

Today’s programme is chock full of environmental chemistry, including a few sessions on pharmaceuticals in the environment. In the last few decades chemistry has given us more and better drugs, and we have not been shy about taking them. One graph of pharmaceutical consumption in France from 1970 to the present was hair-raisingly steep. All those drugs that aren’t broken down by our bodies are, well, let’s be scientific here, excreted and enter the waste-treatment stream. Some end up in rivers and lakes.  Read more