Here's one more story for you out of Justin Gallivan's laboratory at Emory University. Gallivan has been using bits of RNA called riboswitches to turn gene expression on and off. At the conference, he reported he could turn on E. coli's propeller in the presence of a pesticide, giving the bugs chemical-following properties that look a lot like what bacteria naturally do with external receptors on their front grille.

Gallivan says motility is a good way to find the best riboswitches, which could then be modified to turn on the gene of your choice. You can read more about it here.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 03:16 PM | Permalink

Microscopic cogs and miniature turbines are fairly easy to make out of silicon, but getting them to move is another matter. Ordinary oil won't work at that scale, and solid coatings rub off in minutes. But now there might be a solution. Check out the story in Nature News.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 03:16 PM | Permalink

There's no rule that says scientists can't be a bit superstitious, especially when it comes to sensitive laboratory equipment. Take, for example, students at Zhan Chen's laboratory at the University of Michigan, who have created a shrine to one of the lab’s two sum frequency generation (SFG) spectroscopy lasers. Chen presented a picture of the shrine, replete with labels, at the introduction to his talk Sunday. I think my favorite part of the shrine is one student’s ponytail, although the inclusion of the thesis defense poster for a student who defied expectations and succeeded in graduating is a runner-up. Click on the image to enlarge.

Chen writes: “Even though our systems are commercial products, for my chemistry students, it takes some time for them to learn how to run experiments. Furthermore, it is not easy for my students to fix problems the SFG systems sometimes have. Therefore, they developed this ‘shrine to the lasers’ in hope that the SFG systems, including a pico-second laser, some nonlinear optical components, and a detection system, would be ‘happy’ to behave ‘normally’ all the time.”

Chen’s group uses SFG to study complicated surfaces and interfaces, including polymers and biological materials. They’re eyeing questions like biocompatibility, polymer adhesion, and anti-microbial peptide activities. The shrine continues to grow.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 01:59 PM | Permalink

In the spirit of our swampy environs, the first press conference Sunday morning was on the special anti-microbial/fungal/viral properties of alligator blood. Biochemist and alligator rassler Mark Merchant of McNeese State University in southwestern Louisiana wasn't on hand to field questions, but two of his colleagues filled in, describing some progress on testing the blood's ability to kill microscopic invaders

Alligators aren’t the friendliest creatures around. They like to fight and sometimes sustain serious injuries; they also live in marches and swamps full of opportunistic microbes. But, the researchers say, alligators seldom get infected.

In 2006, the Sun-Sentinel in south Florida covered Merchant's work. By then, he had found alligator serum killed off all 16 strains of bacteria tested. Now, the number of bacterial fatalities has since gone up to 23, and includes the dreaded MRSA. Human serum is only effective in killing eight of those 23 strains.

No one is quite sure what it is about the serum that works so well, although there was some speculation that lysine and arginine-rich peptides may be responsible. Merchant's colleagues are in the process of looking into this.

Still, I’m left wondering whether alligator blood will ever yield useful clinical treatments. At higher concentrations the serum is very effective at killing cells -- including healthy human ones. I wasn’t able to get a clear answer from the presenters as to what the toxicity is like for human cells. It could very well be that alligator blood is an indiscriminate killer.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 08:35 PM | Permalink

Greetings from New Orleans, where an anticipated 15,000+ chemists have descended on the ever-resilient Morial Convention Center. Last month's American Physical Society meeting passed under the city's radar, but this meeting is so large, the welcome mat extended all the way to the airport, which boasted a "Welcome ACS" sign at the baggage claim area. I'll be covering the conference's first three days, from Sunday to Tuesday. Stay tuned for more dispatches as well as links to online news coverage.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 06:46 PM | Permalink

It's almost time for the American Chemical Society's spring meeting. This year it is in New Orleans. I'll be there from April 6th to April 10th, blogging and looking out for chemical news and gossip.

Check out In The Field for regular updates from this the largest of chemistry conferences.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 05:19 PM | Permalink

That's it, I'm off. I've had a great week, as ever the conference didn't fail to surprise, impress (and exasperate). All good ingredients for a productive few days. I assume the delegates were equally as productive. We'll find out in New Orleans in March, I suppose.

Hopefully I'll make it home on time - please British Airways... I am anticipating a huge welcoming committee.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 08:13 PM | Permalink

It's the last day of the conference, a sleepy atmosphere pervades the air. Or at least my head, which has up until now been filled with worms - but you'll have to pick up a copy of Nature next week to find out why I might be investigating worms at a chemistry conference. The suspense is unbearable, I know...

I saw some talks on antibiotics today. Resistance to antibiotics has one good thing going for it, that's for sure - chemists and biochemists are always going to be in a job. Talking to Gerry Wright after his talk really brought this home - we might find a way to beat drug-resistant bacteria, but the bugs are constantly beavering away working out ways to beat us back in return.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 04:31 PM | Permalink

There was a new session in the medicinal chemistry session today, called Hot topics in medicinal chemistry. I spoke to the session organiser, Jeff Zablocki, about the motivation for the session - he wanted to get industrial parties to come and talk about new results. This wasn't easy, he said, but he managed to pull together a session with five different companies come and talk about early results for five different drugs.

One of the talks was by Thais Sielecki, from Cytokine PharmaSciences. She was showing us new preclinical data for a type of molecule based on small molecule inhibitors of macrophage inhibitory factor, MIFs. Her impressive data showed that their orally-delivered drug could halt MS symptoms in mice, and actually show improvements in some symptoms. Sielecki told me that for a small company like Cytokine PharmSciences, a chance to present data like this is great for getting business partners. Of course there was a large chunk of data - such as the structure of the actual product - that she didn't show, but I noticed lots of furious scribbling going on in the room anyway.

It's always going to be hard to get pharma compnies to disclose information, but Jim McCarthy, programme chair for the Med Chem division is planning to encourage more openness - with the introduction of a session at the next meeting for companies to make first announcements about clinical compounds in medicinal chemistry. And take up has been good so far he says. But he knows that there will never be any disclosure of new target molecules. "This is industry" he says. Intellectual property rights will always keep peoples' mouths clamped tightly shut.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 01:17 AM | Permalink

This week has driven me slightly insane, for a number of reasons. Included in those reasons is the vastness of the conference. We all say it, year in , year out and i've been trying to bite my lip. But really, ACS - can we have a conference that doesn't involve half-hour bus trips between venues?

Now that's off my chest let me tell you about ionic -liquid marbles. I saw some incredibly cool videos of droplets of ionic liquid being rolled in PTFE powder, and then forming marbles which are very hydrophobic and have amazing floaty properties on water surfaces. The work is being conducted by Tom McCarthy and Lichao Gao at the University of Massachusetts.

Some of the marbles they made were magnetic and could be dragged around - with potential for drug delivery. The coating of the marbles is held in place by magic. Well, actually, it is held in place by electrostatic forces (but i thought i'd inject a bit of children's storybook fantasy into this post), and this means that when an electrostatically-charged rod - rubbed on a pair of nylon trousers or something like that - is brought near the marbles they pop! And in drug delivery this could mean them being dragged to a target using the magnet, and then being allowed to release their bounty with the stroke of a charged wand...

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 06:48 PM | Permalink

Yesterday, I popped along to hear Roald Hoffmann (again) talking at his own birthday symposium. Also there was author and neurologist Oliver Sacks, who is not a chemist, but when i met him this morning was wearing a very natty periodic table t-shirt. It was in colour, much better than my white-on-red version. Note to self - update wardrobe.

Back to the facts. Roald Hoffmann got a Nobel prize for some very clever theoretical chemistry and some rules that explain, and can be used to predict ,why and how reactions proceed. But his first published paper was actually on the thermochemistry of cement. Fascinating.

Oliver Sacks has not only a periodic table t-shirt, but he told me that for the past 60 years has carried a periodic table in his wallet as well. I don't think it has been the same one all that time, because it was in very good condition. And haven't they added umpteen elements in the past 60 years?

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 03:40 PM | Permalink

here's a bit of gossip - Avogadro's constant, the one that lets you work out how much is in a mole of something, is under threat from a bunch of physicists who want to see it declassified as an absolute number, and instead tied to Planck's constant, which is altogether more complicated to explain but essentially is used in quantum mechanics to bunch things into packets, or quanta. Not very clearly explained, but i'm no physicist. Check out other definitions here and here.

The person who told me this shocking piece of news is a member of th ACS nomenclature committee. Before you all rush out and try to recaluclate the number of moles in your morning coffee - dont' panic. My source tells me that on a practical day to day basis, there will be no change, although explaining moles to a tenth-grader will be more difficult if the change ever makes it through.

The paper that started it all was apparently published in the journal Metrology, by Ian Mills, although i'm having trouble tracking down the paper.

From my brief conversation, it seems that the idea is to relate Avagadro's number to Planck's constant so that the number becomes a relationship between the two numbers rather than an exact number. The grandiose phrase i heard was that this would relate Avagadro's number to the invariants of nature. What would happen in your world if suddenly you had to redefine Avagadro's number? Anything? Nothing?

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 01:51 AM | Permalink

I have just worked out that, since saturday afternoon, all my meals have been sandwiches for one reason or another, although I almost ate a slice of cold pizza at one point, but didn't want cheese-related nightmares so declined. I have broken the cycle now thanks to a chocolate croissant in the press room.

My mind turns to food because a major thread of this conference is the genomics of obesity. In particular i was interested to learn that human adenovirus-36, known to be the "obesity virus", has now been shown to turn stem cells into fat cells. Magdalena Pasarica at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center and Nikhil Dhurandhar from Louisiana State university, took stem cells from the fatty tissue from a bunch of liposuction patients. Half of the batch of stem cells were exposed to Ad-36, and half not. The virus-infected stem cells developed into fat cells.

So does this mean, as long as i don't get the virus, that i can happily eat my chocoate croissants without worry of becoming obese? Or am i missing the point?

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Ah, the poster session. I like these things; they have allowed me to perfect that useful social skill of marching up to strangers, thrusting a hand out in the hope it will be shaken, and saying "Hi, I'm Katharine. Who are you?" Once in a while the tactic pays off and you learn something incredibly interesting.

Tonight's session was slightly marred, not for the first time, by the realisation that members of the press had not been issued with drinks tickets. I had experienced this at the previous ACS meeting so should have anticipated it. Instead i had to charm one of the posterees into donating one of his tickets. In return i got to learn about rotaxanes that can be stacked up to make switchable liquid crystals, in a very elegant piece of chemistry. This is the first controlled, switchable liquid crystal to be made, and no surprise that the work, done by Ivan Aprahamian (thanks for the beer Ivan) comes out of the lab of Fraser Stoddart. The work was recently published.

The poster also had a molecular carousel - an incredibly complicated molecular machine with three "axes" joined at top and bottom each holding a ring that can move up and down, independently of the other rings. Hard to describe, but a carousel, where the rings represent the galloping horses, is a good analogy.

My favourite title of the evening has to be "highly absorbing superabsorbent polymers" by Thilini Mudiyanselage, from Bowling Green State University. These are hydrogels that can absorb thousands of times their own dry weight in liquid. The lightly cross-linked 3-D polymer nets expand a lot after soaking up all that water.

As usual, a huge mix of chemistry was showcased at the poster session - from a system that gets rid of bird poo, to a poster called "Girls in science" - bet you can't guess what that was about - and try saying it without using a Muppet-esque "Pigs in Space" voice...

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 03:22 AM | Permalink

I recently wrote a feature about storing hydrogen gas in incredibly porous materials (shameless bit of self promotion there, but one needs to keep the fans happy). But now I'm wondering whether I got it all wrong - a talk today by Bob Crabtree raised an interesting point - the motoring industry has an infrastructure that is all set up to revolve around liquid fuels, so why go after hydrogen as a fuel if one keeps it in the gaseous state?

Crabtree has a strategy to store hydrogen as a liquid, by using organic liquids that have readily-releasable hydrogen. In this case he has studied, both experimentally and computationally, nitrogen-containing cyclic molecules. The amount of nitrogen present can be changed so that the temperature at which hydrogen can be released is also changeable. There is much to say on this topic, I feel... but for now I must run - the monster-sized poster session is happening this evening and I'm hoping for a bit of excitement.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 09:33 PM | Permalink

I think I've just encountered the highlight of my visit - a poetry reading by Nobel prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffmann.

Coincidentally, I've been thinking a lot about poetry lately, and how a poet can convey their thoughts. I am not brave enough to attempt to write anything other than a jaunty limerick myself, so I have a good deal of admiration for anyone who can convey a complex thought in an abstract, but senseful way.

And Hoffmann just spent an hour in the middle of a busy, bustling exhibition hall, packed full of people trying to sell mass spectrometers and the like, with a crowd of people captivated by his poems that cross from hard-core science to his childhood experience growing up in Poland during the war, to more philosphical matters. Check out the next issue of Nature's chemistry podcast, when it hits your ears in a few weeks to hear more.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 06:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Slightly later than planned welcome to the American Chemical Society's Fall 2007 meeting. (Yes it is August, so calling it Fall, rather than Summer rather goes against the Trades Description Act, but this is the US so maybe that doesn't count over here).

I'll be blogging throughout the conference with news, gossip and observations from the meeting.

I am later than planned thanks to British Airways who decided on my behalf that I would much prefer another night in London rather than get on to the flight I was booked on - perhaps they thought I'd like the chance to do some sightseeing, a stroll through the park, across the Serpentine, or something. Still, I wasn't the only one stranded, and here I am eventually. Unfortunately the chances of going to any of the sessions today are very slim, but let's hope the rest of the meeting is a chemistry-fest that will make up for today's no-show.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 08:37 PM | Permalink

I leave for the UK soon. It's been a great meeting, and it's actually still going on, but the last day is always a bit odd, everything seems to close - the expo has packed up, the press room is shut (i'm writing this at the general email point and I think am annoying everyone by taking so long and hogging the computer - oops).

So, until next time, farewell...

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 06:29 PM | Permalink

Things are winding down here. I just went along to the session on cold fusion (read the story here), but my expert timing meant that i arrived just in time for the break. Never mind, I was treated to an advance showing of one of the talks yesterday. I have to admit, I was sceptical, but this is pretty cool stuff. As Frank Gordon, one of the cold fusion scientists said to me, "this actually looks like real science" - and he's right.

Continue reading "ACS 2007 Chicago: Cold fusion anyone?" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 06:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Chemistry meeting grants audience to low-energy nuclear work.

After an 18-year hiatus, the American Chemical Society (ACS) seems to be warming to cold fusion. Today that society is holding a symposium at their national meeting in Chicago, Illinois, on 'low-energy nuclear reactions', the official name for cold fusion.

Read the story here

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 06:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Hello y'all. Apologies for the lack of posts today, I've been imerssed in the world of cold fusion - more of which tomorrow. As such I haven't been to any sessions, which is disappointing, and the conference is almost over - it's certainly winding down. Apparently the ACS bigwigs are already back at home. Bt the conference still has one day to run. It's going to be quite eerie in the cavernous conference venue if the exodus continues at present rates. More tomorrow....

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 02:27 AM | Permalink

There was a chance for us to "meet George Whitesides" today. It was great idea - like a book signing by some celebrity chef or something. Having never met the great man myself I pottered over to the exhibition room and was amused by the long line of people queuing to get their special issue of Chemical and Engineering News signed.

(For those of you who don't know who Whitesides is - he's a professor at Harvard who has the widest ranging research areas I know of - and is doing some interesting work in the chemistry of the origins of life. He's a hero to many young chemists)

I decided not to join the queue, as it didn't seem like i was going to get a chance to really meet the man hiself other than to say "Hello, I'm Katharine, from Nature". Still, I hope everyone else was happy. Whitesides himself seemed to be enjoying himself. I even saw one fan who'd had his shirt signed. Has chemistry just gone rock and roll? Yeehah.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 10:20 PM | Permalink

Polymer technology could speed ships by stopping critters clinging on

Barnacles will no longer slow down ships if the latest polymer coatings being developed live up to expectations.

read the story here

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 05:50 PM | Permalink

The Sci Mix poster session last night was hot, sweaty, and yet again underground with no natural light. I think I'm going to turn into a mole. And what's this? Free beer at the poster session? Hooray. But there was a catch - you needed tokens, and my humble press registration didn't include any. Thankfully the look of horror on my face when i realised this prompted the nice man standing behind me in the queue to donate one of his tokens. Thanks very much.

The session had some interesting posters - here's a brief run down of my faves.... (oh, and watch out for a news story on the news@nature site later on one of them)

Continue reading "ACS 2007 Chicago: Chemists, chemists everywhere and not a drop to drink" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 04:39 PM | Permalink

Using sunlight to split water is a monster job, but a team of chemists is striving to crack this problem in their attempt to save the world.

Daniel Nocera, at MIT, has taken the latest step in his part of the project, known as “Powering the planet”. His task is to find a catalyst to make oxygen molecules once the water has been split into its constituent parts (hydrogen and oxygen). Elsewhere, Harry Gray at Caltech is looking for a hydrogen catalyst, and the final part of the puzzle, the photovoltaic medium that will separate the two catalysts is being investigated by Nathan Lewis.

Continue reading "ACS 2007 Chicago: splitting water" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 04:25 PM | Permalink

I turned my back on academia a few years ago, but i still like to think i have a modicum of intelligence... So why, in my hotel does the non-dairy creamer have a note on it that says "contains milk"? huh?

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

"When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, That's amore..."
So sang Dean Martin. What's a pizza pie? I often wondered. Now I know - cos I've just had some - it's just a pizza with a massive crust, and miraculously by the power of chemistry that very crust was pumping me full of antioxidants.

Continue reading "ACS 2007 Chicago: Dean Martin tribute" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 06:20 PM | Permalink

I wouldn't normally go to the health and safety talks, but this one struck a personal chord with me. "Explosion in a refrigerator results in college laboratory fire". Hey, it could happen to anyone. Really, I didn't know that the fridge hadn't been made chemistry-safe. Really, IT COULD HAPPEN TO ANYONE....

Continue reading "ACS 2007 Chicago: Listen up kids, it could happen to you" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 05:55 PM | Permalink

“Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, your house is on fire and your children are gone…”
Always one of my favourite nursery rhymes, possibly for the gruesome reason that I thought it suggested that all the baby bugs were dead. (And before I delve deeper into this subject of ladybirds I might have to clarify for non-brits that the ladybird is more commonly known in North America as the ladybug, and I will switch to that definition for the rest of this post).

Did you know that the cutest red and black spotted bug is the enemy of another of my favourite things – wine? “Ladybug taint” is responsible for a stench in wine that makes it unmarketable. Bad news, then.

Continue reading "ACS 2007 Chicago: The rotten stink of ladybirds(bugs)" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 08:45 PM | Permalink

Chemistry is great, and I'm not just saying that because I'm at the ACS meeting. Who'd have thought that, in my first hour here, in a crowd of 12,000 (predominately US-based) chemists I should bump into a familiar face - Victor Snieckus, a Canadian-based chemist, originally from the Baltic States, who enthusiastically organises a conference in the Baltic countries every couple of years.

Well, I didn't think it that odd, but according to Snieckus, it is unusual for Canadians to cross the border and venture south to this meeting. That really surprised me, so any Canadian chemists listening, can you let me know why?

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 07:03 PM | Permalink

I've just been to a great talk about making a fuel cell that can be powered by sugar. I liked this talk for a number of reasons, first because it's a great, simple idea that if developed could be a real commerical success. Second, it was work done by an undergraduate as a research project. What better way to be inspired to carry on in research than to do a tangible project. And one that could perhaps bag someone a lot of money one day.

Continue reading "ACS 2007 Chicago: Diet coke won't power my phone" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 05:50 PM | Permalink

Hello from the American Chemical Society's 2007 spring meeting in Chicago. This is my final destination on a long trip across the pond, and it's great. Chicago is lovely and sunny, and I'm looking forward to a host of chemical revelations at this the most enormous chemistry meeting imaginable.

Continue reading "ACS 2007 Chicago: Contaminated moon dust" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 05:33 PM | Permalink

Watch for our reporter’s blog from the 2007 spring meeting of the American Chemical Society in Chicago, from Sunday 25 March - Thursday 29 March. Katharine Sanderson will be posting all her entries here.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 12:59 PM | Permalink

Blackbirds aiming to feast on rice crops could perhaps be kept off with a blast of caffeine, according to research presented here.

Redwing blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) are no friends to rice farmers. They soon grow blasé over scarecrows, and swoop in to devour rice seeds. In Asia, farmers typically hire a corps of workers with slingshots to keep them away. In the United States, people are looking for a more practical, chemical solution.

Continue reading "Birds to get the caffeine jitters" »

Posted by Nicola Jones at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, yet another ACS has come and gone. I leave you with a rainbow of chemistry talks.

"The formation of chromium rich particles by the dissolution of red clays in groundwater monitoring wells" Mysterious chromium in Oklahoma wells found out

"Identification and characterization of off-flavor aroma impact compounds in canned orange juice"
Canned orange juice's flavor attributes are " tropical fruit, grapefruit, cooked/caramel and medicine" Yum.

"Research on environmental fate of phenanthrene in Lanzhou Reach of Yellow River" Math says the pollutants will be stable in the river sediment in 70,000 hours.

"The Pennsylvania Green fluorophore: A hybrid of Oregon Green and Tokyo Green for the construction of hydrophobic and pH-insensitive molecular probes" The search for the next fluorescent marker. Amazingly, there doesn't seem to be a band called "Tokyo Green"

"Highly efficient fluorene-based UV-blue light-emitting polymers with controlled effective conjugation length" Ah, making things that glow.

" Purple: The dye of dyes" A history lesson with recent archeological findings thrown in. I wish I had seen it.

Posted by Emma Marris at 02:01 AM | Permalink

Polymers and biology, together in perfect harmony. This meeting has intrigued me with a number of sessions about bio-related polymers. Timothy Long's group had two: one about determining which physical properties of polymers make the best vectors for gene therapy, and one about using DNA base pairs to make a polymer with two sets of properties. Heat it to disassociate the base pairs, and you get a flowy substance, cool to clamp them together again, and you've got something strong enough to do something with. Plus, there's bio-inspired dental polymers from Temple University, enzymes in polymers for sensors from Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, and polymers derived from soybean oil, feathers, and rice. Finally, there was a presentation on making better cigarette filters from Salmon sperm, from the Ogata Research Laboratory, Ltd.

The general crush on bio-related polymers seems to stem from their ability to acquire reactive, "smart" properties from their biological components, as well as from the environmental advantages of making stuff from things that aren’t petroleum. Now, can they produce the self-drying jacket from Back to the Future II?

Posted by Emma Marris at 07:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

J.J. La Clair, the controversial chemist (for background, see http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060731/full/442492c.html) in the mutton chop sideburns, gave a talk today to a packed room. It was hot, stuffy, and young in there, as he talked us, mic-less, through what he called "an approach used in a number of labs that I've developed, optimized and made easier to use." As far as I could tell as a layman, the approach had to do with designing synthesis of natural products with florescent labeling and biological tests in mind. I'll leave an evaluation of the technical content to others more synthesis (or biology)-savvy than I. I'll just mention that his first slide talked about his Xenobe Research Institute (which is pronounced "zen-OH-bee"). His slide said that the company was working on 80 studies with academe, industry and government. He must be a pretty busy man.

He acknowledged the contretemps over his claimed synthesis of hexacyclinol—and even included on his acknowledgement page a shot of the T-shirt being sold which memorializes the controversy, saying that he salutes creativity in all forms. And yes, that was my headline on the shirt, but I didn't write it. Reporters very rarely write our own headlines—but we do get to write our own blog post titles. So I decree that the title of this post shall be: "butternut squash soup", since that is what I am eating right now.

Posted by Emma Marris at 01:59 AM | Permalink

-Our gung-ho enthusiasm for antidepressants mean that there is a certain amount of Prozac in the water these days. Freshwater mussels are less than pleased, though, since Prozac is making them release their larvae before they are viable. Freshwater mussels are sensitive creatures, and 70 percent of the species native to North America are extinct.

-In an irresistible item, a peculiar bird called the Black-Bone Silky Fowl has been found to be packed with carnosine, which has a rep for anti-aging and other positive health effects. The bird is a staple of Chinese medicine, and has soft white feathers over black flesh and bones.

-Check out the brand new Chemical Structure Lookup Service, hosted at NIH,. http://cactus.nci.nih.gov/cgi-bin/lookup/search

-Fucoxanthin, from brown seaweed, is taken up by the fat. It seems to both reduce adipose tissue and turn the fat a bright orange. Anti-obesity clinical trials are in the works.

-Adrienne Kozlowski, retired chemist, and her husband, have taken up hot air ballooning as a hobby. They say it is a perfect diversion for chemists, because manipulating the balloon is all a matter of mastering the laminar flow of the air.

-Peter Murray Rust, of Cambridge, on the future of Chemical information: "We are going to start mashing, and it is going to amaze the world."

Posted by Emma Marris at 06:42 PM | Permalink

I went to a talk on by UCSB's Robert Vestberg, on "Synthesis of hydrogels with well defined network structure using Click chemistry", because I have been hearing this buzzword floating around – "click chemistry"—and I wanted to figure out what it was.

But first, hydrogels. Hydrogels are polymers all cross-linked together and stuffed with water. They can be useful in medicine, for example, as soft contact lenses. They are biocompatible, key molecules can diffuse through them, and they are tough. Often the crosslinks are induced by a blast of radiation—like UV light, for example.

Vestberg and his colleagues are using "click chemistry" to do their linking. The click concept was described quickly as a reaction catalyzed by copper (I) that seems to be a one-size-fits-all room temp process that organizes your molecules into a regular structure. Functional groups can be knitted right in.

At least that was the impression I got. The meeting room in the Marriot was next to some sort of noisy kitchen or workroom, and it was hard to concentrate. It sounded like they were banging the lumps out of large cookie sheets on the other side of the wall. The "backing up" beep of some kind of vehicle was also intermittently heard.

Anyway, the hydrogels are made in little Teflon molds. You can make them with other fluids besides water, too. "We've done it in crappy Australian wine that I got from my boss," says Vestberg, who is pleased with his gels, which can be stretched to 1500% their original length before they break, much more than UV crosslinked hydrogels.

After the talk, I did some reading on click chemistry, which was invented by Barry Sharpless. It seems like a kind of Lego chemistry to me. You may be interested to know that searching the program of abstracts for this meeting with the term "click" yields 42 hits.

Posted by Emma Marris at 06:18 PM | Permalink

This meeting has it all. Today I caught a wonderful presentation by Frank Lee of Nanchang University about efforts to introduce “Good Agriculture Practice” or GAP (See the FAO’s page on this approach here), on the growing of herbs for traditional medicines. The idea is to make sure the medicines are what they purport to be, are not chock-full of mercury or other toxins, and are being harvested in a sustainable way.

So, field labs have been set up in Inner Mongolia to work of the harvesting of licorice there—used as a medicine to “invigorate the heart, lungs, spleen and stomach,” among other thing. The most interesting challenge they face is supervising the transition from collecting wild plants to growing them as a crop. They are watching to make sure that the domestication process does not affect expression of the active component. Awesome.

Posted by Emma Marris at 07:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The hype-heavy world of haute cuisine has recently been rolling its tongue over the phrase “molecular gastronomy”, said to be practiced by such chefs célèbres as Pierre Gagnaire and Ferran Adrià. The trend is for innovative foods, and new ingredients. Shrimp treated with protein-knitting enzymes, so it can be coaxed into noodle shape, glass-like spheres of isomalt, filled with the smoke from roasting mushrooms, flavored foam.

But On Food and Cooking author Harold McGee, in a session this morning, opined that the term should be ditched. He noted that most chefs labeled as molecular gastronomists rejected the label and say that their experiments rarely take place on the molecular level. Apparently, the phrase came from a workshop about the science of cooking, held in Sicilly in the early 1990s—but the workshop was, according to McGee, was all about the chemical underpinnings of traditional cuisine, and has nothing to do with the Julia Child-meets-Dale Chihuly creations of the new cooking.

These chefs aren’t looking into molecules, says McGee, “they are cooking with ingredients. They are artists, not chemists.”

That said, there are some firm links between the new daring cooks and chemistry. Fat Duck chef Heston Blumenthal questioned the age-old custom of removing the jelly and seeds from tomatoes before cooking with them. To his palate, they were tastier than the flesh. He worked with Don Mottram of the University of Reading to see why, and they found that the jelly has tons more glutamic acid—the source of the famous meaty, nummy umami flavor (See http://www.nature.com/news/2003/030707/full/030707-3.html)--than the flesh.

So, special note to my boyfriend: I now have scientific proof that de-seeding tomatoes is silly.

Posted by Emma Marris at 07:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I bet $100 that this is the first ACS meeting where a session has featured a slide of Jesus Christ with an erection.

Yes, you guessed it, it is the presidential session celebrating Carl Djerassi: chemist, novelist, and playwright. He was a top chemist for many years, specializing in synthesis of marine natural products, and collecting awards like pogs. Then, late in his career, he turned to literature. Lately, plays have been his thing, and at the end of the laudatory session, there was a reading of selections from his play "Phallacy". He played the character Prof. Rex Stolzfuss. But it was in a scene where a young art historian chats with a young chemist about the representations of Christ's genitals in art that the image, an engraving from the 1520s called “Man of Sorrows”, according to the online text of the play, appeared. Alas, no amount of googling can summon up an image, but rest easy, Jesus is clothed…but showing.

I am no theater critic, so I won’t say anything more about the play. I will say, though, as a feminist, it is fun to see the man who first synthesized progesterone—which led to the birth control pill.

Posted by Emma Marris at 03:02 AM |