Monday morning usually means a big jug of coffee, discussions about points accrued over the weekend in the Nature fantasy football league and of course... Nature Chemistry Research Highlights.

First up, Steve discusses studies on the unexpected reactivity of bidentate ligands, carried out in my beautiful hometown of Durham.

Neil writes about a technique for creating nanoscale square patterns using the supramolecular assembly and controlled phase separation of diblock copolymers.

And Anne describes research that shows the transmission of chirality from a monomer to a solid mesoporous material during its polymeric synthesis.

And finally, since the closest I get to doing experiments these days is playing around in my kitchen (and as announced on the last ChemPod, I honestly do wear my Nature Chemistry lab coat when cooking) an interesting "taster" for a book called “The Hungry Scientist Handbook” caught my eye in Wired magazine.

Using kitchen equipment for science seems to be the order of the day. Over at Chemical Technology (once edited by our very own Dr. Withers) they’ve just published a story called “Lab-on-an-egg-beater”.

Gav

Gavin Armstrong (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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We have just the thing to pick you up from your post-weekend back-to-work blues: another selection of research highlights.

Our first highlight reports work on a clever self-healing coating, made-up of several nanolayers, that can heal itself after being scratched.

In the second selection, Ros highlights the synthesis of dendritic scaffolds that could have potential as bacterial infection inhibitors.

Single-molecule magnets are the focus of the third highlight, more specifically the modification of their properties by encapsulating them with polyoxometalate ligands.

And finally, following on from our previous post on periodic tables: Daniel over on “The Great Beyond” told us of a new and strange chemistry creature — a chemical element elephant.

Gav

Gavin Armstrong (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

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It’s time for another batch of research highlights.

First up, fresh back from his trip to Korea, Steve writes about a counterintuitive approach to creating stereocentres: by destroying them first!

Second, the story of greedy metal complexes. Neil tackles the synthesis of a series of heteromultimetallic complexes that contain up to 7 (that’s SEVEN!!) different metal atoms.

Lastly, I get to grips with a motor driven by a light-sensitive elastomeric belt.

Finally, news that wine-lovers across the world can be happy about (I’m off to Napa, California, in a couple of weeks so I’m happy). Eating meat is healthier with a glass of wine than without (maybe it’s not that simple but that’s how I’m going to understand it!). The original paper can be found here.

Gav

Gavin Armstrong (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

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The new chemistry podcast from Nature is now online and can be found here.

In this special nanotechnology show, we discover how a team from MIT are getting nanoparticles into cells, do a spot of interstellar chemistry with an escaping sugar molecule, issue a health warning for those working with carbon nanotubes, and we take a look at the latest online tool helping chemists get hold of chemical information – for free.

Oh yeah... I nearly forgot... Neil and I make our podcasting debuts, calling into the studio to chat about the travel plans of the Nature Chemistry team now that conference season is upon us.

Enjoy!

Gav

Gavin Armstrong (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

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Apologies to all those who logged in on Friday to read the witty and humorous NChem research highlight update but (for various reasons) they will now be brought to you on Mondays - although the highlights themselves will still go live on Fridays.

Another change this week: I’ve been called off the bench to liven things up (like Cesc Fabregas last night in Euro 2008) and replace Neil who is currently gallivanting on the west coast of America.

We all love yeast in the NChem office, (bread, beer, marmite) so before he left, Neil wrote about a mass spec method that has been developed for measuring the metabolites of single yeast cells.

We also all love chocolate and Steve had the pleasure of writing about work on its structure that could hopefully lead to prolonging its shelf-life.

The final paper is about catalysis; more specifically its about the search for cheaper ethylene hydrogenation catalysts.

Some very small versions of a couple of our favourite games caught our eye this week, first a micro version of the highly addictive game tetris and second, a superhydrophobic desktop hockey game.

And finally, if you run out of reagents in the lab this week you could always raid the liquor cabinet. Last week saw some seriously ingenious chemists make diamond out of tequila.

Gav

Gavin Armstrong (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

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