1. What made you want to be a chemist?

I think of myself more as a materials scientist who is intrigued by chemistry. My father inspired me to become a scientist; he was a biologist who clearly loved what he did and was full of enthusiasm about his work. It rubbed off on me.

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be - and why?

I would be a journalist since I love to write, or a chocolate maker. Or better yet, a food critic who specializes in chocolate — then I could both sample great chocolate and write about it.

3. How can chemists best contribute to the world at large?

Human beings have four critical needs: health, food, shelter and entertainment. I think chemists can help with the first three, helping to develop affordable, effective drugs, more productive crops and sustainable housing. As to the last need, it is probably best left to others.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with - and why?

Having dinner with Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain would be wonderful because I am sure the evening would be filled with great stories and laughter.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab - and what was it?

This past year, my friend and collaborator Julia Yeomans wanted to try to create a scaled up version of microscopic swimmers. So we bought some plastic wind-up toys and put them in a tub of gelatinous fluid. Not a complete success — they didn’t move very far. But we forgot to clean the tub and the fluid grew some wonderful blue-green-purple specimens. So, an interesting experiment nonetheless.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one CD would you take with you?

I would take “David Copperfield” by Dickens since it is my favorite novel; I love the characters and they would be good company. As to the CD, I would take a compilation of the Beatles music.

Anna Balazs is in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, and works on theoretical modeling of polymeric materials and complex fluids.

Posted by Neil Withers at 05:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As the title suggests, a good range in this week's Research Highlights.

What do you know about the martian atmosphere? If the answer is "not a lot", you can find out about how the heterogeneous chemistry of radicals and cloud ice makes a difference.

There's a new addition to the venerable science of fingerprints, as Graham Cooks at Purdue turns his DESI mass spec technique in a CSI direction. They can now detect different chemicals present on fingerprints, such as drugs or explosives.

You know how it is: you wait ages for a metal–metal bond under 1.8 Å, then two come along at once! That's what's happened with two groups independently making compounds with the shortest Cr–Cr quintuple bonds. You can read Katharine's take on it over at big Nature news.

And finally...want to find your DNA soul mate? Now you can, thanks to a Boston company that will analyze the DNA behind your immune system and find the best match for you. And it only costs $1,995.95. Is there is anything chemistry (and a couple of grand) can't do?!

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 05:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

When I entered college, I thought I was going to be an engineer. But then I took my first real chemistry class (5.11 at MIT), and I was simply amazed at the world of molecules. Challenging and wonderful (thanks to Silvia Ceyer) physical chemistry courses followed, and I discovered the world of chemistry research as an undergraduate in Mario Molina's lab. Now here I am in the Chemistry Department at UC San Diego, with Mario Molina as my faculty colleague!

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be - and why?

I'd write biographies of ordinary people from all over the world. This job would combine many of my non-chemistry interests, such as experiencing other cultures, writing, and traveling.

3. How can chemists best contribute to the world at large?

One of the most important responsibilities of a chemist, or any scientist, is to actively shape the laws that guide society. Many of the problems that we are trying to solve (energy crisis, pollution, etc) can be lessened by relatively simple changes in the rules that govern our civilized lives.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with - and why?

Ernest Shackleton was an Antarctic explorer who endured 800 miles of the most treacherous waters in a small lifeboat and crossed severe terrain to save his crew stranded near Antarctica. His extraordinary leadership, skill, and perseverance are inspirational - what was this man like?

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab - and what was it?

As an assistant professor, I still work very closely with my students and go to the lab almost every day. Today I helped my undergraduate student obtain a resonance Raman spectrum of a carrot using our new microscope. It doesn't matter how many times I have seen these data (including publishing a paper on it), I still get excited seeing the molecular fingerprint of a vegetable!

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one CD would you take with you?

This is an easy one - I would bring East of Eden by John Steinbeck with me. To offset this tragic and intense tale, I'd turn to one of my favorite textbooks from college, The Stars by H. A. Rey, to identify the beautiful shapes in the nighttime sky. Music? Top 80's hits (as defined by Richard Blade) are a must, as well as Johnny Cash and Mozart's Marriage of Figaro.

Judy Kim is in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at The University of California, San Diego, and works on spectroscopic studies of biological systems. Her research areas include membrane protein folding, peptide-membrane interactions, and biological radical intermediates involved in electron transfer reactions.

Posted by Neil Withers at 05:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The ACS meeting is over, so I guess it’s time for me to climb aboard the love train and head for home. Oh, alright then, it’ll be a cramped flight to the UK, I was just trying to squeeze in a reference to the Philly sound before I left.

But before I go, here are a few bits and pieces from the meeting that made me think, smile, or both. A lot of them seem to involve Barry Sharpless.

Some quotes:
“A man in California just won the Nobel prize for mixing paint and wine.” - Headline in a Los Angeles newspaper following Barry Sharpless’s Nobel win.

“This lovely picture of Edinburgh is one that I took recently - from the internet.” - Dave Leigh

“You say this was done with a burette? I could do better with a graduated cylinder.” - Comment from William Crowell on a young John Roberts’ titration technique.

“Enzymes are swirly things, they’re spaghetti monsters.” - Barry Sharpless. Surely not a reference to the cult of the spaghetti monster?

Things I learnt at the meeting:
Some chemistry sets 77 years ago included recipes for gunpowder.

‘Detartrated’ is the longest single-word palindrome in the English language, according to Barry Sharpless. (To detartrate means to remove the tartrate from wine.)

The spell-check program on my laptop corrects ‘aldehydes’ to ‘baldheads’.

Other things that made me smile:
Barry Sharpless’s impression of an olefin.

That’s all for now, I’m heading for home sweet home.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 05:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In one of my previous blog posts I mentioned a great presentation given by Steve Chu on Monday and I’ve finally found some time to say a little more.

In his talk he described the current plight of the planet and gave some fantastic insights into the problems we face. He highlighted predictions that have been made about various environmental markers that were frightening. The one that scared me the most was a prediction that Chu said amounts to “unplugging the refrigerator in the north and allowing everything to rot”. He was referring to a positive feedback mechanism that will kick in if the permafrost of the northern hemisphere melts, releasing enormous amounts of methane and carbon dioxide.

On a related cold-storage theme, he gave data that showed that the energy saved through the manufacture of contemporary high efficiency refrigerators is greater than that produced from renewable energy sources! That's not to say we should be just making better refrigerators though. He spoke about several “transformative” technologies that are required to provide step changes in the way energy is created and distributed, arguing that incremental steps won’t solve our problems. The technologies he mentioned included energy storage in batteries, cheaper photovoltaics, a green revolution akin to the “transformative” Haber–Bosch process, and artificial photosynthesis (which took a large step forward recently). And as Katherine pointed out in an earlier post, chemists will play a central role in these developments.

The talk was a massive eye-opener; I knew we were in trouble but when you’re presented with hard facts by such an authoritative and passionate guy, you listen. But, equally he showed there is hope, and that it lies within scientific research.

Gav

Gavin Armstrong (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Gavin Armstrong at 08:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I haven't spent much time outside the confines of the conference - apart from the sun-drenched stroll between the convention centre and another venue, the Sheraton, about a mile away. So yesterday I thought, enough is enough. I went for a run over the Benjamin Franklin bridge with Neil Gussman, PR guy for the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and US army sergeant.

The run was amazing, the pedestrian bridge is much higher than the cars and the cars are much, much, much higher than the Delaware river. If you need to escape the city, you could do a lot worse than this towering piece of metal engineering.

Today I took another trip to CHF, to check out their new, and very impressive, gallery. It's still under construction, but the floor-to-ceiling interactive periodic table installment (made in part by he of the Periodic Table Table fame, Theo Gray) is already in place. It is awesome. Videos run for each element, and the whole thing cascades from the huge 2-storey ceiling to the floor on a massive array of TV screens.

The new galleries are also hosting a travelling art exhibit, molecules that matter. This is a collection of artists' representations of 10 selected molecules that have influenced society in the past 100 years. Apparently the choice of molecules upset some staunch organic chemists. I can't see why. You should pop over and see if you're getting cabin fever in the conference.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 05:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The answer to the question posed above isn't clear. I went to a session about plastic devices that could be used as solar cells instead of expensive silicon, hoping to hear a breakthrough was nigh. Sadly I was wrong. Advances in plastics that can capture light over a useful wavelength, that can separate the charge into electrons and holes, that can carry that charge and finally, do something useful with it, are being made. But slowly.

Talking in the session was Fred Wudl, who was first to develop fullerene/polymer systems as photovoltaic cells. It seems that the system he hit upon first up has been hard to beat, at least according to Mats Andersson, from Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, who was also speaking in the session.

Percentage power conversion efficiencies remain low. The very best results are around 5%, and these tend to be from a single, meticulously prepared sample - a long way from a manufacturable, large scale printing process that is hoped for. To be really viable, a system that is 10% efficient is needed, or a slightly less efficient, but very cheap plastic material that can be made to cover a large area. But still, despite lots of tinkering with the polymers in the systems, the best that Andersson presented was 2.8% efficiency. Manpreet Kaur, from Virginia Polytechnic presented a system with an efficiency of 1%.

The systems rely on the electron-transporting properties of a polymer, and the hole (absence of electron) transporting properties of the fullerene groups. The main way to change these systems is altering the polymer groups.

The field is gaining strength, however. One company, Konarka, is claiming that it will have a flexible, efficient, solar cell plastic available by the end of the year. We shall have to wait and see.

The session certainly generated interest, but I can't help thinking that the efficiencies are going to remain low for a while yet. Perhaps next year, if Konarka has delivered, academics will have joined them in finding a more efficient system.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 05:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I always like to check out a few sessions at ACS meetings that fall outside my usual beat. This time, I noticed a few interesting sounding sessions on ‘Visualizing chemistry’, so I went along to one this morning. It was fascinating stuff. A positive smorgasbord of imaging techniques awaited me, ranging from mass spectrometry (yes, you can use it to make pictures) to X-ray photoelectron spectromicroscopy. Oh, and there were lots of acronyms.

One thing I wasn’t aware of were how many techniques are available to work out the elemental distribution in a sample. For example, Richard Leapman gave a great talk about the use of STEM-EELS (Scanning transmission electron microscopy-electron energy loss spectroscopy) to generate three-dimensional images of cellular components. In this way, he has produced some great pictures of ribosomes that show exactly where the phosphorus can be found.

Completely different is the aforementioned X-ray photoelectron method. David Surman (he doesn’t have a personal web page, as he works in industry) described the latest imaging innovations in this technology, which produces elemental maps of surfaces. He described an example in which the method was used to study some medical-grade stainless steel samples (used for bone implants and so on), which were found to be prone to corrosion after laser ablation. He discovered that the laser-zapping led to a build-up of chromium at the edges of the ablated region. This build-up was the source of the corrosion problem.

But my favourite talk was from Martin Kessel, representing the High Resolution Electron Microscopy group at the National Cancer Institute, USA. They used 3D electron microscopy to image the ‘spikes’ that stud the surface of HIV. These spikes don’t form a regular pattern on the surface, which makes it difficult to get a reliable image using traditional electron microscopy. But by using a technique that generates an average image from thousands of pictures of individual spikes, a high-resolution structure has been produced. Crystal structures of parts of the proteins that make up the spikes have previously been obtained, and these dock beautifully into the microscope images, thus validating the crystal structures. Furthermore, the microscope has caught an image of the spike in complex with a CD4 receptor on a cell, revealing the changes in protein conformation that occur when HIV invades a luckless cell. It’s really great stuff, with fantastic pictures - Nature subscribers can read the paper itself at this link.

Great stuff, but sadly not terribly well attended, perhaps because the meeting room was tucked away in a obscure part of the building. It’s a real shame, because I’m sure that these talks would have been of great interest to many people.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At the general poster session the other night I was delighted to see the two candidates campaigning for the job everyone is talking about. No, not McCain and Obama, but the two candidates for the president-elect of the ACS. As the biggest scientific society in the world, this is a big job.

As I approached one of the candidates, Josef Michl, I noticed he was chattering to Bob Grubbs (see earlier post). Michl was very keen on sustainability. And this is a broad recurring theme of this meeting. Chemists realise the opportunities they have to help the planet. Of course, chemistry is the underpinning science to the technologies that are being investigated to replace fossil fuels. I can only imagine that in future this theme is going to engulf these meetings even more.

The other presidential-elect candidate had a very firm handshake and free colour-changing pencils. Another Joseph, from Purdue, Joseph Francisco told me about his plans to unite retired chemists and young, keen postdocs to create an ACS-centred bank of expertise. His focus was much more on the business side of chemistry, and in particular small businesses.

Two very different candidates with very different agendas. It will be interesting to see who wins. At the moment I wouldn't like to call it, but the trend towards sustainability gives me the feeling that Michl might just steal it.

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

You travel a good few thousand miles and the last thing you want to see is your boss (no offence Stu). Thankfully, he’s back in the UK happy that I’m here doing all the running around associated with an ACS meeting, but I just can’t seem to get away from pictures of him.

I went to a talk by Sir Fraser Stoddart yesterday at which he received the 2008 ACS Arthur C. Cope award. His talk was a nice run through of some of the beautiful work he’s done (both aesthetically and chemically). Fraser likes to give credit to his old students by putting photos of them up on slides when he talks about the work they did. The Nature Chemistry chief editor, Stuart Cantrill, is a Stoddart protégé and thus the talk was littered with Cantrill references and pictures, to the point where he was acknowledged, alongside Stuart Rowan and Omar Yaghi, as a pioneer of the newly branded area of chemistry ‘mechanostereochemistry’ — high praise indeed.

Fraser even gave Nature Chemistry a mention. Reaching more people than I ever could in my whole week here, he named Stuart as someone who as the founding editor of Nature Chemistry could “considerably influence how chemistry develops in the future”.

And there was me thinking he was just someone who could considerably influence the time at which the Nature Chemistry editors get their next cup of tea! Get the kettle on Stu!

Gav

Gavin Armstrong (Associate editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Gavin Armstrong at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve spent most of the last couple of days in sessions organized to celebrate 100 years of the ACS physical chemistry division. They’ve been packed with some real science heavyweights and in general, have mixed some great 'memory lane meandering' with new results.

Monday started with Ahmed Zewail (Nobel prize in chemistry, 1999) from Caltech. He spoke about advances in visualizing complex structures in 4 dimensions i.e. seeing them change in time. He presented some very interesting images of ZnO nanowires using ultrafast electron methods and visualizing material expansions related to charge carrier density. The talk was interrupted by a little “cross-talk” from another session. The organizers must have set the wireless microphones for two parallel sessions to similar frequencies meaning that every few minutes a presentation from another session was broadcast over the speakers in our session. The freakiest part of this was when Prof. Zewail clicked through to a slide detailing what is known as the “uncertainty paradox”, and with great comedy timing the cross-talking presenter said the word “paradox”. It was as if Zewail had his own sound effects!

The talk was followed by Yuan Lee (Nobel prize in chemistry, 1986) who described his many years carrying out molecular beam studies and Steven Chu (Nobel Prize in physics, 1997) who gave an inspiring but equally depressing talk (if you can have such a thing; I’ll blog more about this later).

Both the afternoon session and the following morning session were filled with more great speakers including Dick Zare, Rudy Marcus and Gabor Somorjai. It was fantastic to see such leading academics present both their seminal and contemporary work but it would have been nice to see a session in the physical chemical division for young academics, similar to the one held by the ACS organic division, which was a great success from what I hear on the ACS grapevine.

Gav

Gavin Armstrong (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Gavin Armstrong at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I’m going to stick my neck out a bit here, and discuss some chemical biology, even though I wouldn’t claim to be much of a biology expert. Apologies if some of the details are a bit ropy.

This morning, Linda Hsieh-Wilson gave an inspiring talk on her work unravelling the role of the polysaccharide chondroitin sulfate (CS) in modulating neuron growth. Naturally occurring CS is a mixture of compounds, each containing a different pattern of sulfate groups. This makes it difficult to tease out the effects of particular sulfation patterns, but Hsieh-Wilson’s group have made several tetrasaccharides as models of CS, each with one of the different characteristic arrangements of sulfates found in the parent molecule.

They find that only one of these tetrasaccharides (called CS-E) promotes neuron growth in their in vitro studies. Using CS-E as a molecular probe, they’ve now started to unravel the likely biological mechanism of action. It seems that CS-E forms a ternary complex with brain-derived neurotrophic factor and the receptor TrkB. Blocking formation of this complex prevents CS-E-mediated neurite growth.

But CS is a double-edged sword - it can also prevent neuron regeneration after injury. Hsieh-Wilson is now using her compounds to unpick the reasons for this. Her tetrasaccharides weren’t effective substitutes for CS in in vitro models of neuron regeneration, so her team came up with a method to prepare CS-E polymers (containing 25-80 sugar units). Sure enough, these polymers inhibit neuron regeneration, showing that the CS-E sulfation pattern is most likely responsible for the biological effect. Furthermore, an antibody that blocks CS-E activity was able to counteract the inhibition, thus encouraging neuron repair.

Exciting stuff, especially as there is currently no way to stimulate regeneration of damaged neurons. Of course, this is a long way off providing anything that would be therapeutically useful, but just being able to unpick the biological mechanisms that prevent neuron regeneration strikes me as being incredibly useful. And it’s a perfect example of how chemistry can provide tools that answer biological questions.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 04:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I wrote a story yesterday about a clever way to make tiny batteries using a rubber stamp and a virus. It was actually from a paper that came out in PNAS, but one of the authors, Paula Hammond is here at the meeting. She is working with Angela Belcher on some very cool viruses.

The paper outlines a simple way to build up a polyelectrolyte system, and coat a virus onto it, then let cobalt oxide nanoparticles grow on that. Stamp all this cobalt-side down on to a platinum strip, add a thin piece of lithium to the other side and hey-presto! A teeny tiny battery.

In my discussions with others about the work, it seems that people have been playing around with viruses for a while now, but we should start to see a lot more practical applications coming out of this tinkering in the next few years.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 01:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been attending so many interesting sessions that it’s been difficult to find time to blog, but I’m going to redress the balance now. First off, I just wanted to mention a terrific talk yesterday from John Bercaw, which gave an update on his work on the mechanism of the Shilov reaction. If you’re not familiar with this reaction, it was one of the seminal discoveries that underpins modern C-H activation chemistry. Unfortunately, it’s stoichiometric, but Bercaw is hoping to make a catalytic version that will provide a practical method of converting alkanes into alcohols. That goal is still some way off, but he’s found some promising water-compatible catalysts (water compatibility will be essential) that look like a good step in the right direction. I was particularly impressed by his obviously meticulous approach to research - if anyone can crack this problem, then he can.

Then yesterday afternoon, I attended a star-studded symposium that celebrated the 100th birthday of the organic chemistry division of the ACS. With speakers such as David MacMillan, Ken Houk, Larry Overman, K. C. Nicolaou and Barry Sharpless, this was the must-see event of the symposium, and the massive ballroom venue was packed. Befitting the anniversary theme, each speaker gave their perspective of historical advances from their fields of interest.

So how do you pick out a highlight from such an illustrious line-up? With difficulty, but my favourite speaker was John Roberts, the emeritus professor from Caltech. At 90 years old, he’s certainly the most senior speaker that I’ve seen at a conference. I have a fondness for the history of chemistry, so I lapped up Roberts' stories of his early career, and his reminiscences about the leading figures of the time. For example, R. B. Woodward was described as having three trademarks - he always carried a cigarette, always used a yellow pencil and invariably dressed entirely in blue. Other snippets included the details of Roberts’ work during the Second World War, when he was co-opted onto a project to find a way of extracting liquid oxygen from air at low pressure (because airplanes at the time carried oxygen tanks, which made them rather vulnerable to fires).

Looking back at his project work as a student, Roberts commented that he was lucky in being able to work on several completely different areas. Nowadays, he commented, graduate students specialize early on, and so they miss out on the benefits of a diverse practical training. The solution, he says, is to provide opportunities for undergraduates instead. In this respect, he feels that summer-school research opportunities for undergraduates are essential. Do any of you think that grad students are forced into specializing too soon?

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 01:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night was the poster session. It was late, I was jet-lagged, tired and emotional, but I dutifully showed up, if only to get my free beer. As ever this was a really well-attended event. It's impossible to see everything so I decided to pick some of my favourite titles for you to muse over. They show the amazing breadth of this meeting, and some of them actually make chemistry sound, well, really interesting.**

Impact of thermal and nonthermal processing techologies on quality of apple cider (one close to my heart)

Lanthanide pyrone and pyridone complexes for the treatment of bone density disorders

Reinvigorating the chemistry curriculum with Fourier-Transform Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (FT-NMR) spectroscopy

Measurement of the contact angle of a water droplet on a flat surface

Heavy metal accumulation by common garden plants: A chemical and spectroscopic approach

** I'm not saying that chemistry isn't interesting, by the way. I love chemistry, but sometimes it is hard to persuade others not involved in the field.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some people have all the bad luck. I was recommended to go this morning to a session on self-replication. Sounds cool, I thought. I bet it will be busy...

But I was very wrong. Where was everyone? The recommendation turned out to be right, and I really enjoyed Douglas Philp's talks about self-replicating systems, but the room must have had about 15 people in it. I didn't get it, so I asked Philp how come he had failed to pull in the punters. "I was up against Bob Grubbs," he said.

Ah, it all becomes clear. That's bad luck I said. Grubbs is a Nobel prize-winning chemist from Caltech who is a giant in the catalysis world. He even has his own catalyst.

Poor Doug, I thought. Still, better luck for his next talk this afternoon. Nope, it seems the Philp brand of chemistry will fail to reach the masses once more. This afternoon he is up against Barry Sharpless, also a Nobel prize-winning chemist, from Scripps, who has more than one eponymous reaction.

Ouch.

The message to Doug Philp, and anyone else landed with these unfortunate timetable clashes is clear: you're going to have to get a reaction or a catalyst named ofter you. Or you're going to have to win the Nobel prize in chemistry. Preferably both.

Better luck next year, eh?

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A few weeks ago I wrote a news story about some work done by Dan Nocera at MIT. He's managed to make a very simple catalyst that can generate oxygen directly from water - so helping those people trying to mimic photosynthesis and save the world's energy crisis.

At the time Nocera wasn't sure what the mechanism was for the formation of the cobalt catalyst. In today's talk he confirmed what he had thought then - that the cobalt gets oxidised all the way to its +4 oxidation state. He was also very confident in the technology he is developing. "I guarantee in under five years you'll see this," he said. Companies are coming out of the woodwork, he says, to develop a functioning, practical system.

Other big claims he made were that in a system based on his catalyst cuold produce enough fuel to run a typical house for a day in just two and a half hours. This is big talk, Dan, I look forward to it becoming reality.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a slight deviation from the ACS yesterday while I finished up writing a story about trees that can absorb organic nitrates and turn them into amino acids. But seeing as in that single sentence I spotted at least four chemistry-related words, I thought this would be a good place to write about the research.

I shan't go into loads of details, because then you might not go and read the story (and I can't believe anyone would miss out on the chance to do that), but the news here is thus: trees, well known to gobble up inorganic nitrogen compounds, can also take up - and use, more importantly - organic nitrates that are the products of NOx emissions and the volatile organic compounds that trees spew out.

It's not yet clear whether this mechanism might actually help to alleviate NOx pollution, and at the same time increase photosynthesis thereby locking up more carbon. If that were the case that would be a very good news story indeed. It looks more likely that this effect is dependent on local conditions. And as the author Paul Shepson told me, even if the mechanism does help clean up the atmopshere a bit, the better solution is to stop the emissions in the first place.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While half the office seems to be at the ACS, from London here's another slice of what's going on in the world of chemistry: our Research Highlights.

Stu covers a Nature letter that shows that you can make C₆₀ using a more advanced method than just vapourizing graphite rods. By putting the right aromatic precursor on a platinum surface and heating, the atoms just curl up into the familiar spherical shape.

My highlight covers a route for making arrays of colloidal particles, which resemble opals. These sparkly microspheres are made on a superhydrophobic surface, which gives really good size and shape control.

Gav worked on the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction during his PhD, so was quite excited to cover some work putting it to an interesting use. Coupling the BZ reaction to a responsive hydrogel results in a material that shows a peristalsis effect. If, like me, you can only dimly remember what that means, think of toothpaste tubes or swallowing mechanisms!

Keeping us amused in the world of science this week has been this extra digging on the cloned dogs story. And the news that scientists have proved that 'beer goggles' are real. I'd like to hope that the researchers are now getting to grips with the beer jacket and beer scooter phenomena.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 04:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As is traditional for any editor from a Nature journal attending an ACS meeting, let me begin by telling you my own personal trauma in getting here - my plane didn’t have any water in the restrooms for washing your hands. Instead, the airline company improvised by putting out bottles of drinking water for us to use. But I’ll swear that, by the end of the journey, they were using sparkling water in some of the restrooms. Presumably if they’d got really stuck in first class, they’d have started using the champagne.

With that off my chest, let’s talk supramolecular chemistry and molecular motors. I attended a session this morning that showcased some of the younger movers and shakers from organic chemistry, and I especially enjoyed Adam Urbach’s talk, about designing supramolecular binding systems based on cucurbiturils (the name always makes me think of cucumbers, but that‘s probably a problem unique to me). Some cucurbiturils can trap two ‘guest’ compounds simultaneously, and so can be used to hold together appropriately designed molecular units attached on separate peptide chains. This makes it easy to set up two or three binding sites on one chain, which accept the same number of appropriately spaced binding units arranged on another chain. Such systems have previously been difficult to make. Rather neat, I thought.

In the same session, Jonathan Nitschke talked about systems in which a selection of amines, aldehydes and metals react to form a dynamic combinatorial mixture of self-assembling complexes, which eventually reach an equilibrium in which just a couple of products have formed. Nitschke has now reached the point where, for one of his systems at least, he can devise an algorithm that explains the outcome of the equilibrium. Impressive stuff, and I look forward to seeing where this line of research will go next.

But an oscar for cinematography must go to Ben Feringa, who in an afternoon session showed some mind-blowing footage of a dynamic surface rippling with waves, the result of chemical changes in the molecules that make up the surface. David Leigh competed with his movies of droplets of liquid oozing their way up an incline, in response to light-induced changes in the properties of the underlying surface. Amazing. And all the result of rotaxane chemistry.

Day one is over (so fast!) - here’s looking forward to tomorrow.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 05:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Before I forget - I wrote a story last week about a race to break the record for the shortest ever metal-metal bond. A race that the participants didn't seem to be aware that they were a part of.

Check it out.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The meeting is in full swing, and here in the city of brotherly love, beshorted chemists can be spotted all over the place. Quite a sight for the uninitiated, I can assure you.

I wandered into the ACS board meeting this morning, which also includes bigwigs from other international chemical societies today. It was an open meeting, I didn't gatecrash. I got there in time to hear a discussion about what the ACS can do to be more sustainable.

This huge meeting with 15,000 participants (and, bizarrely 25,000 hotel rooms booked), will take its toll on the city - not only because the poor Philadelphians have to play host to these many thousand scientists, but in terms of an environmental impact. Massive rooms need to be serviced, shuttle buses fuelled, conference programmes printed etc etc etc. This is clearly something the ACS feels bad about. Madeleine Jacobs, board member, did point out that the meeting is in some ways a hostage to the city in which it is held. But I was amused to hear talk of virtual meetings as a solution. I am sure they were talking about smaller division and board meetings, because I think the internet would buckle and break if it had to play host to all this chemistry all at once.

But it is an intriguing concept. Will big meetings like this become obsolete as sustainability becomes more relevant to more people?

[NOTE - I am also posting these blog entries and more on the Nature News blog - In the field]

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 04:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve arrived in Philly for the ACS meeting and it was after a less eventful journey than the one taken by the last Nature Chemistry editor that attempted to get to an ACS meeting. My flight thankfully set off and landed more or less on time and it was predictably full of chemists.

I spent the day and night cursing chemistry; it’s not the best of starts for a week spent with hundreds of chemists all talking about it. My first problem was at the airport where I cursed materials chemists. Nobody in particular, just in general and to be honest it’s not really their fault. Let me explain: I broke my iPod headphones after somehow tangling them up and tearing their outer sheath, thus exposing the internal wires. Curse number 1: why can’t they make tougher materials to protect my headphone wiring?

After checking in at the airport, I bought some new headphones and wandered off to my gate. This is the point at which I realised there was no way of opening the extremely tough plastic packaging that encased my new headphones without using scissors. How many pairs of scissors do you think there are around airport gates… yup … there are (quite reassuringly) none. Curse number 2 was aimed at polymer chemists who can make very tough, thin materials that are evidently very well designed to protect the encased cargo*.

This leads me to my first session here at the ACS. I went along to hear Krzysztof Matyjaszewski introduce the sessions on Controlled Radical Polymerisation (CRP). He gave a very interesting talk about the current status of research on the topic and affirmed to me how complicated poymeric synthesis can be. There are so many different types of polymers (homopolymers, block copolymers, periodic copolymers, graft copolymers, etc ...) that can be created using this method and the very complex kinetics involved in the CRP process need to be expertly controlled to get the product/properties you need. I’m at peace with polymer chemists now, they may have caused me all kinds of problems with my headphones but the talk this morning showed what interesting synthetic work they’re currently doing.

My third chemistry gripe was with that of my own body. I woke up at 2.30 AM this morning completely wide awake and unable to get back to sleep: the joys of jet lag and an upset circadian rhythm. I admit to knowing little about such things but a quick internet search shows that it’s related to melatonin secretion cycles and mine must be a little upset. This graphic shows that I was supposed to be in the deepest part of my sleep around that time and instead I was wide awake watching the qualifying rounds for the Olympic men’s discus throwing (I must go and have a chat with these guys at the poster sessions this week). This also infers that at about 6 PM this evening I’ll be desperate to sleep, so I must go and squeeze in as much chemistry as I can before I drop off — I have planned an afternoon quenching my thirst for physical chemistry at the 'water mediated interactions' session.

* With the help of two publishing pals from the Royal Society of Chemistry, I managed to open the packaging for my headphones using my house key, my teeth and pure brute force.

Gavin Armstrong (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Gavin Armstrong at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

I always liked science and nature even from a young age (around 6). I was fortunate enough to have great chemistry teachers in 8th grade (age 13) and in high school (age 15). I also found high school chemistry labs far more interesting than biology (I killed things) and physics (boring).

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be - and why?

I would have two part-time jobs: one working outside in a garden, and the other in a coffeeshop/bookstore, both of which would pay me over $100,000 per year (as long as I am describing the ideal situation). I like to be outside, drink coffee, and read a lot of books so this is the perfect combo.

3. How can chemists best contribute to the world at large?

Scientifically, by connecting the molecular scale we deal with to larger, more complicated systems like biology, medicine, the environment. Of course we also have the chance to get students excited and more knowledgeable about chemistry early at the university - many students have to take chemistry, not just chemistry majors. So education of future citizens, to look at the evidence of phenomenon and come up with a good explanation that passes multiple tests, is a general good that chemists and other scientists bring to the world.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with - and why?

Julia Child - she was a hoot, and plus would make us a great meal!

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab - and what was it?

Sadly, years ago as an assistant professor, when I was purifying compounds and DNA by HPLC. I still visit the lab every other day or so, and do demos for my university chemistry class.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one CD would you take with you?

Dante's Comedy (Dorothy Sayers translation) and KD Lang's Hymns from the 49th Parallel.

Catherine Murphy is in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of South Carolina, and works on metal nanoparticle synthesis, optical properties and applications; she also has an interest in the nanoscale structure and dynamics of DNA.

Posted by Neil Withers at 06:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For those of you who don't know, today is International Lefthanders Day. Hooray! A celebration of chirality if there ever was one. I wonder: if we were made with D-amino acids instead of L, would left-handers be righties and vice versa? If we met aliens, would it blow our minds more if they looked just like us or if we figured out that they were just like us except made of D-amino acids? What if you found your alien doppelgänger and you measured your optical rotation and it was exactly opposite? Even worse, what if it wasn't opposite?! Would it mean that one of you had some crystallographic impurities??

Enough of that silliness! Well, one more bit of silliness: I have been watching the Olympics, and the coverage of synchronized diving is very interesting. One unexpected thing I noticed is that, when the dive involves a turn (along the vertical axis, not a flip), it still counts as being synchronized if the two divers turn in opposite directions. Wouldn't it be awesome if the commentators described this as chiral?

Ok, on to even less silly stuff: I am looking forward to the ACS meeting next week. We were talking in the office earlier this week about why people continue to go to such a huge overwhelming meeting when you could go to smaller meetings. However, the ACS meeting is always a great place to meet old friends or that famous professor you've been admiring. Plus, it always keeps me entertained with the huge diversity of topics - I can learn about everything from forgotten aspects of drug discovery to the most recent advances in proteomics, or even try to figure out the basis of left-handedness at sessions like this.

Anyway, I hope to see you there! If you don't see me in some of these sessions, you can probably find me somewhere in Philly, trying to figure out how to use right-handed scissors.

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 09:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Just to keep you on your toes, Research Highlights are coming to you on a Tuesday this week. So read on for your chemistry fix!

Steve loves total synthesis, and he got to write about TWO approaches to a pretty hot natural product. Platencin shows activity against MRSA and has been tackled a few times recently, but these approaches are effecient and rapid.

Next up, some porphyrins are linked together directly, rather than with spacers, and that gives cyclic arrays with better light-harvesting potential.

And last, but laughably by no means least...you might have noticed a vast amount of press coverage about Dan Nocera and Matthew Kanan's water-splitting Co catalyst. We couldn't really not cover it! I was fortunate enough to hear Dan's talk about it at ICCC38 and speak to him afterwards. For those wondering if this really will be the next big thing, he said an Arab oil sheik is going to use the technology in 50,000 houses in a new town...gulp.

You can see a video about the breakthrough made by Chemical Explorers, or the man himself at MIT Tech TV.

And finally...a wine-tasting sensor has got a lot of coverage this week, but I think I'd rather take the risk and do the tasting myself! Meanwhile, apparently there's a little sporting event happening over in China. Seeing as chemists most often get bad press at the Olympics thanks to drug cheats, here's a slightly more positive angle: Oxford chemistry graduate Jen Goldsack is competing in the double sculls for the US. Any other Olympian chemists out there??

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 04:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

A combination of natural curiosity, parents who are scientists (with enough patience to answer endless questions), good teachers throughout my school years - and finally luck, in the form of the admissions tutor at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Durham. The Natural Science course for which I'd applied was over-subscribed, and Mike Crampton wrote to ask if I'd like to change my application to chemistry. I did, and 12 years later, here I am on Nature Chemistry.

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be - and why?

Working for Heston Blumenthal on his 'molecular gastronomy' would be pretty amazing, and certainly looks great fun on TV. But that's practically chemistry!

3. How can chemists best contribute to the world at large?

Engage with it. Chemistry can, and has, improved the world to a staggering degree, but people just don't seem to be aware of it. So if the general population can appreciate what chemistry has done for it, that engagement could remove some of the problems that chemistry is perceived to cause. For example, people might be so keen on polluting if they understood the potential damage more.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with - and why?

Bede and Linus Pauling. Defining what chemistry is, is always tricky, but for me it comes down to chemical bonds, and Pauling pretty much invented the way we see chemical bonds today. In addition to his chemistry Nobel Prize, he also won the peace Prize for campaigning against war and nuclear weapons, and he remains the only person to win two un-shared Nobel prizes. Bede was a monk in the kingdom of Northumbria in the 7th century AD (a system of reckoning time that he in fact invented). While he's remembered today as 'the father of English history', his knowledge and influence is far greater than that. It's incredible to think that, in a place often seen nowadays as so far from civilisation at the time, he 'had at his command all the learning of his time'.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab - and what was it?

Well, outside the lab, I made some Chelsea buns before I started on Nature Chemistry. I followed the 'lab script' carefully, weighed out my 'reagents' as accurately as I could and ended up with better looking 'products' than I ever made as an undergraduate! The pictures are on Facebook if anyone cares to look. Seriously, the last experiments I did in my PhD were conductivity measurements - but not before the seriously fiddly soldering of copper wires onto my precious samples (metal oxychalcogenide pellets), and hoping for an ohmic contact.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one CD would you take with you?

As lots of other people cheat on this one, so shall I! I would love to take the 20 books of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey–Maturin cycle or all the Jeeves and Blandings books of PG Wodehouse. If you're going to be strict, I'll plump for a Ray Mears survival guide! The man's a legend anyway...

As for a CD, it's a close call between Johnny Cash at San Quentin and the Stone Roses' eponymous debut album. I think the Stone Roses win on points!

Neil Withers is an Associate Editor for Nature Chemistry.

Posted by Alison Stoddart at 05:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

For those of you who haven't noticed, Nature Chemistry is now open for business - our online submission system is up and running...

Such a small sentence, but it is the culmination of a huge effort by a large number of people.

Online submission systems don't just build themselves, it takes a number of talented individuals to make sure that they are compiled correctly and run smoothly. Many test manuscripts passed through an imaginary peer-review process and were evaluated - not particularly thoroughly - by the likes of Dr Green, Professor Black and Mr Brown. Inboxes were flooded with large numbers of e-mails to make sure the correct message was dispatched under the appropriate circumstances. After all, you don't want to accept a manuscript when all you actually are trying to do is send someone a message confirming their submission... try getting out of that one!

To coincide with the online submission system going live, we needed to put together a guide to authors. To put together such a document, we needed to sit down as a team and decide what we actually wanted to put in it. What article types do we want? How do we want them submitted? And so on... In addition to the editorial concerns, our production department also cast their eye over the GTA to make sure their requirements were met and then the whole document was copy-edited. If we're telling you not to make mistakes when compiling your paper, it would be embarrassing if we had mistakes or inconsistencies in the GTA.

That's still not all though. Web production had to put the GTA on our website and that also involves tweaking the navigation on the site and making sure that all other related sites at NPG now point to the right place. Marketing needed to know when we were going live so that they can get the message out to the wider chemical community and so on....

And so, the manuscripts are starting to arrive - so I probably shouldn't spend too much time blogging today, I need to go and look up some references. (Although I plan to put up a post in the near future about the choices we made concerning article types).

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Materials Girl

It seems that the editors have lately been posting on the go, so I figured I could get away with adding my own little adventures to the mix... I am on the return trip from a weekend visit to L.A. – it’s now back up north to finish the last month of my internship. At the moment, my flight is under “mechanical delay” for technicians to “take a look at” an emergency latch. We are projected to depart under an hour late, so it’s nothing like Stu’s mishaps on route to ACS conferences. It must be said, however, that the cause of the delay is of some concern. I can just imagine the emergency door detaching mid-flight, with me in the adjacent seat...

In terms of more chemistry-related delays, labwork has been slowing lately due to finishing a milestone in my project and working on a poster for our facility-wide presentation day. Speaking of which, this is the first scientific poster I have created. Any tips? Succinctness, accuracy, organization, and overall aesthetic pleasure are my current goals – along with providing tangible evidence that chemistry outshines the other research departments. We will definitely have prettier pictures than, say, the CS people. (Synthesizing fluorescent nanoparticles beats writing computer programs. Hah!)

In any case, there’s still pressure to finish what my boss has planned for the summer, even though I may be a lowly intern who is NSF funded – and hence of little financial interest to the international corporation. Deadlines and such in ‘real life’ research are worse, from what I’ve gathered, but I will finish my work regardless (assuming that the theoretical chemistry works itself out in time). No need to protest about my situation – as long as they don’t stop bringing mini-bagels to our weekly group meetings.

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 06:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

After a little while out of the office, what better to start the week than bring you all some fresh Research Highlights...

In a nifty link to Catherine's post on pi interactions, Steve highlights some people measuring arene–arene face-to-face inteactions.

Ros has written about rotaxane molecules whose muscle-like contraction can be controlled by different wavelenghts of light.

And finally, Jane features some work by Ben Feringa and colleagues, who have speeded up a molecular rotary motor based on cyclopentane - it now speeds round at megahertz frequencies, thanks to a picosecond photochemical isomerisation.

As it's the start of a new month, why not go and check what's Astromolecule of the Month over at The Astrochymist?

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 05:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

The thrill of discovery and the beauty of molecules. I fell in love with molecules at the age of 10 when I saw a stick-and-ball drawing of two molecules (water and methane) in a text book I randomly came across in our school library. That started my fascination with molecular drawings and patterns, which later led me to develop reticular chemistry (stitching molecules together by strong bonds into networks).

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be - and why?

A pianist or gardener. These professions (jobs) are solitary and some of the very few jobs where the fruit of labor and Nature can be beautifully revealed.

3. How can chemists best contribute to the world at large?

Chemists are unique because they are able to exchange an atom (or several) in a molecule and turn it from a poison to a medicine. Such tiny change and such great impact are a result of our knowledge of how atoms are connected and how to alter such connectivity for various uses. We must keep this goal in mind as chemists and thus continue to make vital contributions.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with - and why?

Galileo for his incredibly convincing yet simple defense (“…I wrote what my mind did not think”) that got him off.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab - and what was it?

The experiments I did when I was 25 years old as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard involving the solid state synthesis of Re/Se clusters. Generally, I am terrified of beakers, flasks, tubes and all that they hold, which kept me away from my laboratory: it’s an irrational fear of these objects in particular and many others too numerous to list here.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one CD would you take with you?

The Oxford English Dictionary, and Turandot.

Omar M. Yaghi is a Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA and works on the chemistry of linking molecular building blocks into useful crystals for clean energy applications.

Posted by Neil Withers at 06:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)