The plenary lecture this morning was by Peter Bruce, from the University of St Andrews, over on the east coast of Scotland. His message was an appeal to chemists to open their minds in order to save the world from climate change. Free yourselves from thinking of the immediate applications, he said, and this challenge can be faced. "The chemistry to tackle this is still going to be fundamental chemistry," he says. Chemists should forget the immediate technical challenges.

Stirring stuff. And he had some very good reasons for saying this. Bruce has spent many years looking at ion transport in polymer electrolytes, and along the way has invented a better way to probe the structure of these large crystalline polymers that are otherwise too large to get x-ray crystal structures of.

How can this help climate change? Well these fundamental chemistry advances have found their way into lithium batteries - the things that charge our laptops, mobile phones, as well as powering tiny implantable medical devices of the future.

Bruce is now looking at ways that might - eventually - make the charging and recharging process of batteries much much faster. This process involves lithium ions moving from one material to another. They travel one way when the battery is being used, and when it's plugged in again to recharge, they hop back over from whence they came. As many of you will know, this can take hours.

Bruce's work on solid crystalline polymer electrolytes could help. But to understand how these materials work their molecular-scale structure needs to be understood. The problem has been getting single crystals to do crystallography on. So Bruce developed a powder diffraction technique that worked a treat.

He's also spent a lot of time investigating why and how these crystalline polymers can conduct. The reason is that ions in crystalline polymers hop, which is very different to the way floppy non-crystalline systems work, he says. The conductivities they show are way too low for industry, he says, but doesn't much care. "Scientifically it opens up new avenues," he said. And curiosity has led his group to investigate other metals in the same group of the periodic table as lithium.

Next is the challenge of making the energy density of the materials better. To try and get a ten-fold improvement in energy, Bruce has developed a lithium-air battery, where oxygen from air reacts to start the ion motion. It's a neat idea, and you never know, it could work.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Remember the latest addition to the periodic table, copernicium, element 112? Well the fall out from the name choice has begun.

The abbreviated symbol that discoverer Sigurd Hofmann chose was Cp. This hasn't been confirmed by IUPAC yet, and this is the body that has the say in the end, but it seems appropriate that here at the IUPAC congress that the discussion over this shortened symbol should be aired.

The problem is that for many synthetic chemists Cp already means something - it is used as a shorthand form for the cyclopentadienyl ring, a 5 carbon and 5 hydrogen ring that is aromatic like benzene and often used as a ligand.

So some chemists are inevitably unhappy about the use of Cp for another purpose. One of these is Paul Chirik from Cornell University who in his talk about main group chemistry apparently said he wanted to start a campaign to have the abbreviation Kp, not Cp used for element 112. This, apparently is etymologically correct, because Copernicus was actually Polish and his name was spelled Mikolaj Koppernigk.

Chirik assures me he said this in jest and is by no means an expert in this area. But I wholeheartedly encourage this kind of campaign! Come on chemists, stand up for the rights of cyclopentadienyl ligands! Kp vs Cp - what do you think?

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Disaster struck at the poster session tonight. I thought that the session organisers had decided to extend the reach of refreshments provided to include rose wine (a summer drink) and I gladly took a glass full of the pink stuff. To my horror I discovered it was cranberry juice. Tsk.

Luckily, to calm my nerves I had the pleasure of talking to Charlotte Mallet a PhD student from the University of Angers, France. She explained to me that she was trying to take biomass - cellulosic waste from agricultural processes - and make electronic devices.

So far she has managed to make oligomers based on furans, derived from the fructose molecules she gets from the biomass. From this she can make an organic plastic and from that a transistor. The properties of this device aren't quite good enough for industry, Mallet says, because they have low mobility, which means they can't carry electrons very well. But she is working hard to improve this and hopes to have a news device by September.

I'm not sure how seriously this proposition will be taken in attempts to save the world from burning fossil fuels, but perhaps every little helps.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 04:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in my youth, when deciding what subjects to study at school and university I wanted to make sure that I would come out versed in something that would be of use to the wider world, perhaps even do some good. I chose chemistry. It's clear from conferences like this that many chemists are interested in the subject for similar reasons.

Climate change is a big topic that chemists are tackling. This morning's session on carbon capture and storage being a good example.

This is a technology intended to clean up coal-powered power stations by scrubbing out carbon dioxide from flue gas, and compressing it to be stored elsewhere - anywhere but into the atmosphere.

There are a number of problems that chemists are looking at. Today kicked off with a talk by Gary Rochelle from the University of Texas at Austin. He took us through the major considerations that are needed for the solvent that is used to collect the carbon dioxide from the gas. The standard at the moment is something called MEA, monoethanolamine. Rochelle's fundamental physical chemistry calculations on this and other candidate solvents showed that there isn't a simple one-size-fits-all solvent. The considerations are: capacity of the solvent to hold carbon dioxide; how much the solvent degrades when heated; how fast the reaction is; how much heat it requires.

Some of these properties are better in different solvent, he says, which are again different in different plants. Another good candidate solvent looks to be piperazine.

Then we heard from Trevor Drage from Nottingham University, UK, about using solids not liquid solvents to strip out the carbon dioxide. His systems are a long way from being scaleable but show promise. On paper, he said, solid sorbets could reduce energy loading in the systems by 30 - 50%. These systems are amine polymers loaded onto porous silica-based materials, or basic nitrogen in an activated carbon matrix.

One area that is often overlooked, says Drage is the regeneration of these sorbents and how the carbon dioxide is removed so they can be reused.

Matthew Hunt is from Doosan Babcock, a Scottish-based company
spending a lot of effort in scaling up CCS technology, with demonstration plants in Canada. This is just a 4 tonne plant so far, which is no real use for a power plant which will need to porcess 850 tonnes of carbon dioxide a day, he said. But according to Hunt, the company is on track to full-scale post-combustion carbon dioxide removal by 2014.

Of course, the impetus for these small demonstration scale plants needs to come from government, and the feeling in certain quarters of this meeting at least, was that not enough push, and not enough decisiveness is being shown to make the technology viable.

My hope is that in 2014 we are not still at the stage where academics working in small groups are showing results of small scale CCS projects and saying that scale up is needed urgently.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 08:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you happen to swing by the Nature stand at the IUPAC congress exhibition, you'll have a rare treat. In the booth opposite is the stand for the next IUPAC congress, which will be in Puerto Rico in two year's time. 2011 is also going to be the International Year of Chemistry.

The stand there has on a loop a video of Puerto Rico's most famous (?) export Ricky Martin, as well as Marc Anthony (J. Lo's husband). This really is a rare treat in a chemistry conference, let me tell you.

Another treat is bumping into the congress chairman over a glass of wine at the poster session. Paul O'Brien from Manchester University seemed to be feeling the pressure of constant dinner engagements over the week. He said the whole experience made him nervous. From where I was standing listening to the gentle murmur of happy chemists I would say that any nerves were unfounded.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 04:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Chemists love to talk about the details of a synthetic reaction: swapping this carbon atom for that one, changing the angle between sulfur atoms by 2 degrees and so on. So during this morning's talk by Daniel Rabinovich from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I was happy to listen to him talking about tinkering with ligands to try and recreate the chemical environment that a copper atom finds itself in the small protein methanobactin thinking no more of it other than "chemists like to try and do this kind of thing".

Methanobactins are a small part of the large bacteria called methanotrophic bacteria that use methane to make their own carbon and energy. At their heart is a copper binding compound, which has fairly unusual chemical groups called thiones around it. As far as I could tell, the interest was in the synthetic challenge in recreating these unusual chemical group around the copper atom.

I mean, if chemists want to try and mimic nature's functions they tend to go after big things, like photosystem II, or a huge protein structure.

But I was wrong. It turns out that a patent was granted (to other scientists unrelated to this work) on the small copper-based protein methanobactin because it is a potent antibacterial agent against S. aureus, although this is a delicate protein that will be hard to recreate in its natural form.

Whilst trying to recreate the chemical geometry of the copper atom in this small delicate protein, Rabinovich actually found a way to make a synthetic version of an antibacterial, and that is what he's working on now.

Rabinovich has a better chance of making large amounts of the stuff. His work was all based on known procedures - albeit some obscure ones.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 07:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On my way up to Glasgow from London I did a spot of sailing. On the trip from Fleetwood, Lancashire, to Whitehaven, Cumbria, for a long time we could see the nuclear fuel plant Sellafield. It spans a vast area of the Cumbrian coast line.

So it was with interest that I spotted a poster by phd student Sarah Wallace from Leeds University in the UK.

She has been looking at how strontium, a waste prduct from Sellafield, wil move in the sediment near the plant, and if it might make it into the groundwater.

The contaminant plumes from the plant tend to have a high pH, and what Wallace had found so far is that in these conditions strontium-90 likes to stick to sediment. This could actually be good news for Sellafield because the half life of strontium90 is such that as long as it sticks to the ground it will have decayed within 300 years or so.

Strontium is potentially nasty because it's in the same chemical group as calcium, a major bone component. So if strontium gets into the water and into the body, it can compete with calcium in the bones and cause diseases such as leukemia.

Wallaces work involved a fake contaminated bit of land - taking normal soil and untouched groundwater from the area and spiking it. In future she hopes to see what the longer term effects of strontium-90 are.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 04:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Who'd have thunk it - a chemistry conference full of space news. It's not that weird really, when you consider that the search for life = search for molecules.

Lars Kristensen from Leiden University in the Netherlands today showed us his maps of methanol in space. He is making these maps so he can see how methanol is distributed in the material that young stars are made from. Methanol is used as a tracer for early star formation and forms on the surface of interstellar ice-covered dust grains. He'll also soon be able to compare his methanol maps with results of water abundance from Herschel, which set off recently to check out the most distant objects in the universe.

Methanol forms as ice on dust grains. According to Kristensen, the major way that the methanol escapes from the surface of these grains is not by heating thermally, but by a non-thermal mechanism, be that activation by UV light, or other methods.

The abundance of methanol in the areas that Kristensen looked at, using the Harp B instrument on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, was constant throughout those areas, he says.

Check below the fold for one of his maps.

Continue reading "IUPAC '09: Mapping methanol in space" »

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Hello from Glasgow, Scotland. Home to the deep fried mars bar, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Gordon Brown MP, and now, for one week only, the IUPAC congress.

I'm here to delve into the finer points of chemistry and to see what is getting chemists salivating this year.

The first session I went to was about artificial photosynthesis. The process that plants carry out with ease - turning sunlight into stored energy - is causing a major headache for scientists trying to mimic the process.

Rather than try to rebuild the molecules used by nature for photosynthesis, chemists are looking at systems that they can build and understand better, and use them to do the same jobs that plants do with their complex molecular machinery.

In these systems, sunlight is used to power the separation of charge - from a neutral molecule to one with a positive and negative component. But the big problem is keeping those charged states apart from one another for any length of time. If they recombine, the charge separation, which could lead to electric current, is lost.

Today I got to see how making the molecules really long with the charged ends separate from each other in space can help. Ken Ghiggino from the University of Melbourne, Australia, uses a set of four porphyrins, which are big ring-shaped molecules. One end has a zinc atom sitting inside the ring and the other a gold atom. These two metals can shunt a charge from one end to the other. The trouble is that this kind of system is far too complicated to ever be manufactured on a large scale.

Another suggestion is simple dyad systems with one charge donating and one charge accepting part. But as Andy Benniston from Newcastle University showed us, to separate the charge with these systems is also not as easy as hoped. He suggested that when previous chemists have claimed to have a long lived charge separated state what they had actually done was form a different quantum state called a triplet state. This is something else entirely.

All this is yet more evidence that nature is unfathomably clever in its use of molecular processes to gain energy, and that humans are way behind in our understanding. But thanks to chemists who refuse to get depressed by this notion, one day we may just be able to take sunlight and produce energy that we can store and use at will, without destroying our world.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Element 112 has a name! Taken from Nicolaus Copernicus, the man who said that the universe didn’t revolve around the Earth, and that we were actually spinning round our star, the Sun.

Element 112, first discovered in 1996 by the group of Sigurd Hofmann at the centre for heavy ion research in Darmstadt, Germany has been in want of a name since it was officially recognised by the International Union of Pure an Applied Chemistry last month.

Hofmann wanted to buck the recent trend of element naming to come out of his lab – which gave us a rush of elements named after fairly modern-era scientists: Bohr, Meitner, Roentgen, as well as a couple named after places nearby: Hess and Darmstadt.

“We wanted to make a step into history and we looked for people who changed our thinking,” Hofmann told me. Apparently there were other candidates but Hofmann was being coy about naming them.

Copernicium (with the middle ‘c’ pronounced as a ‘ts’) won’t be officially official until the IUPAC has gone through its lengthy procedure of checking the name and suggested abbreviation – more of which shortly – and making the suggested name known to the public for six months.

As for that abbreviation, Hofmann’s suggestion is Cp. This, of course, to you chemistry geeks out there, is also a commonly used abbreviation for the cyclopentadienyl group (a ring of five carbon atoms with five hydrogen atoms).

An alternative would be Cn – but Hofmann is worried that that looks a little too much like Cu, which has already been bagsied by copper.

And next? Well, Hofmann has already begun his search for element 120, and hopes that this will give him another go at choosing a name. The next chance to name an element is likely to be a group at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, where IUPAC is considering claims that they made elements 113 and 115, and possibly even 118.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | 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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Nature had on its cover yesterday a great story about transmission electron microscopy (TEM). No, really.

Jannik Meyer, now at Ulm University, and Alex Zettl, at Berkeley, have developed a technique, kind of by accident, to allow them to see single atoms of teeny elements, even hydrogen, in a standard TEM. Check out the paper, related news and views and online news piece.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 06:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is one of the best chemistry videos, nay one of the best videos, full stop, I’ve ever seen.

The video accompanies a paper (abstract here, subscription needed for full paper) in Organic Letters about a photochromic molecule (one that can change between different forms when hit by light of some kind) that flips back and forth really quickly when UV light is shone on it.

The molecule changes from colourless to green, and that’s pretty much the best thing about it – so look at the video.

If you want to know more about the chemistry, which you might, then I can tell you that the molecules are hexaaryldiimidazole derivatives, and are a cyclic systems containing naphthalene units.

These kind of materials are used in spectacle lenses that change colour in bright lights. But really, just watch the video, that’s all you need to know.

[Hat tip: The Chem Blog]

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Best song of the 80s? Gold by Spandau Ballet. But it seems that the frilly-collared Spandau boys were far from original in their lyrical choice. According to a survey undertaken by Santiago Alvarez, in the department of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Barcelona, the most popular elements referred to in music are, from the top; silver, gold, tin and oxygen.

I was amazed to hear that tin was so high in the elemental hit parade, until a quick survey of the Nature News team opened my eyes to its prevalence elsewhere than in the Wizard of Oz (incidentally the tin man’s song never mentions his eponymous metal).

How could I have forgotten the brilliant And the band played Waltzing Matilda, by Eric Bogle (and also performed by the ever-slurry Pogues), with the line “They gave me a tin hat and they gave me a gun”. And a quick google search shows that even soft-focussed Katie Melua mentions tin in her song What it says on the tin. I’m not sure that the suggestion that tin’s ranking was due to the Belgian cartoon character Tintin is right, though.

Other gems plucked from the minds of the Nature News team include: platinum wheels in Minnie The Moocher; lithium in Nirvana’s Lithium; silicon in the Boomtown Rats' I don't like Mondays; hydrogen and helium in They might be giants' Why does the sun shine? and almost every single element there is in the genius elements song by Tom Lehrer.

Iron has to be way up there too, what with all those rockers – "Iron man, by Ozzie and friends,” one Japan-based member of the team enthused when asked what element-containing song sprang to mind.

I’m very impressed that the New Journal of Chemistry published this comprehensive opinion piece, which goes much further than simply being a survey of a “musical cyberstore”, as suggested in the press release.

Alvarez goes to great lengths to discuss the history of scientific elements in music – from the original earth, fire, water and air, to Mendeleev and the periodic table. It’s well worth a look (although you might need a subscription) to learn about elements mentioned by some of the world’s greatest composers – Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Handel to name a few. Here’s factoid from the paper: Edgard Varese wrote a piece dedicated to platinum, called Density 21.5 – it was a solo piece for the flute, and the performer Georges Barres was trying out his new platinum flute – platinum has a density of 21.5 grams per cubic centimeter.

If you can think of any other element containing songs (Pocket full of kryptonite doesn’t count) let us know. Here's a selection of songs to inspire you, written by school kids, set with the task of composing a song that mentions 80 elements. As expected, this is pretty difficult unless you just list the elements. Still, some imagination has gone into an elemental version of an Eminem song.

Of course, music is an element in its own right, according to the periodic table produced by the BBC's Look around you team; symbol Mu, atomic number 4, atomic weight, 4.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 05:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

It's been a while since I blogged here - apologies. I haven't been neglecting chemistry though - far from it. I've been ferreting away on a feature article, just out in Nature this week.

It's all about trying to find ways to copy the processes in photosynthesis to split water and produce a fuel - hydrogen. Yes yes, I know it is already possible to split water, but the latests efforts have a longer-term goal of finding sustainable, friendly materials to do the job. And it is a lot harder than it might sound.

Nature uses catalysts to drive complex multielectron processes, but exactly what the molecular nature of these catalysts are isn't known. So trying to directly copy them is challenging. And finding a completely different system that works as well, nay, better, is harder still.

A recent paper in Angewandte Chemie has a catalyst that can perform half the job, and impressive it is too, working as it does at room temperature and with reasonable turnovers. But still, it is a tetra ruthenium compound. Not likely to come in as an economic competitor to fossil fuels, unfortunately.

There will be a session at the ACS, organised by UCLA graduate students, called NanoPOWER that will likely address many of the challenges remaining for power, and fuel production. I'm hoping to be there to see what alternatives chemists can offer.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of papers about some N-containing annulenes have been retracted and/or corrected after it was pointed out to the authors that the reaction they claimed made these exotic rings was actually 103 years old, and that they were much more likely to have made a pyridinium salt. There is a news story about it here

Does anyone know of this kind of any famous examples of a literature-search oversight leading to an erroneous claim like this?

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Nature's second chemistry podcast is now live!

Plug your iPod in and have a listen. In this issue we take a look at high-throughput screening; go on a literary detour thanks to Nobel prize winning chemist, and poet, Roald Hoffmann, and learn why chemists spend years mimicking Nature's methods to make molecules.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

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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 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 companies 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 08:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Quick, hurry over to booth 434 in the exhibition hall, you still have 42 minutes to get your entry in to win an iPod so that you can listen to the Nature chemistry podcast... Hurry! The draw will be made at 11 AM.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 the ACS nomenclature committee. Before you all rush out and try to recalculate the number of moles in your morning coffee - don't 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 Metrologia, by Ian Mills, although I'm having trouble tracking down the paper.

From my brief conversation, it seems that the idea is to relate Avogadro'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 Avogadro's number to the invariants of nature. What would happen in your world if suddenly you had to redefine Avogadro's number? Anything? Nothing?

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 09:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

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 chocolate croissants without worry of becoming obese? Or am I missing the point?

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | 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 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So, here I am , gathering news for Nature. Like Andy, I had a less-than smooth arrival, after being unceremoniously bumped off my flight last night. But here I am, a day late and raring to go.

I'll be blogging mainly on the news@nature.com site, so check back to get the latest from the conference floor...

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 03:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Steve Ley's latest total synthesis triumph is a whopper - the 22-year, 64-step synthesis of azadirachtin. Nature's news story attempted to tackle the subject of total synthesis as a whole, and see where it might be headed, as there are many mutterings, in quiet corridors, that the field is not what it once was. The article has prompted some discussion on Derek Lowe's blog, whereas synthesis fans can get their azadirachtin fix over at Totally Synthetic.

Reactions on the piece have dribbled into my ears with opinion falling strongly on both the pro- and anti- total synthesis sides. It would be interesting to hear what others think... I might add that the motivation for the news piece was not to rubbish the field, rather to explore a geniune debate within the community.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 08:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Everyone reach for your iPod (or generic mp3 player) - the most chemistry entertainment you're likely to hear today is now available in the guise of the Nature chemistry podcast. Clear the fluff from your ears and check it out here.

In this issue Gareth Mitchell takes at closer look at how our eyes work, with the help of carbon nanotubes; the chemistry blogosphere is deconstructed; and Harry Kroto explains why he thinks the British government is killing UK science. We also have a special report from Fraser Stoddart's 65th birthday party.

The blogging feature has already created a reaction with this post on The Chem Blog, and here at carbon-based curiosities.

The Chempod is the first in a series, next time comes all the gossip from the ACS fall meeting.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the words of my news editor, I've had a day geeking out on chemistry, and it's been great. Two papers in Nature this week about newsworthy chemistry (it's all newsworthy, I hear you cry....).

I'm not sure which was my favourite - as someone who did their masters degree doing organometallic synthesis in ionic liquids, I loved the latest application of the erstwhile green solvents - to support a liquid mirror on the moon. (News story here and paper here.) And the accompanying News and Views article focuses on ionic liquids, rather than going to the moon (which my news piece hangs on). It was a bit of a leap of imagination for whoever thought about using ionic liquids in this way, but a great new application for them. I'm impressed. Of course, we have to colonise the moon first - a minor point.

The second news story from a second paper was about another subject I have delved into in the past - biofuels (see feature). This latest research effort uses acid-hydrolysis to turn fructose into 5-hydroxymethylfurfural, and then a ruthenium/copper catalyst to turn that into 2,5-dimethylfuran (DMF). DMF has the potential to be a far, far better biofuel than ethanol. All that is required now is the funding to develop the processes.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here I am having a whale of a time at the Fraser Stoddart 65th birthday celebrations. Celebrating a birthday with science; I like it. I like it a lot. The line up of speakers is incredibly impressive. These are all people I would want to hear talk at, say, a huge meeting like the ACS. But the beauty of this conference is that you don't have to wade through 15000 abstracts to find the best speakers. They're all here, undiluted.

I wrote a news story about the festivities, but was just too late to include one of the highlights of the conference - Chad Mirkin has used his dip-pen nanolithography technique to draw Fraser's portrait in a one-molecule high layer of 16-mercaptohexadecanoic acid on a gold surface. Unfortunately I can't post pictures here, but I will update later with a link to the pic. It's well worth seeing.

UPDATE: The portrait is here

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 08:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

A chemistry paper in Science came out yesterday where materials scientists have studied the hardness of rhenium diboride. It is SUPER hard and ULTRA incompressible (my addition of capitals for extra emphasis - I like saying things like ULTRA in a booming voice).

Here's a news piece I wrote for news@nature. While I was digging around, a number of researchers pointed out that this isn't a new material. So why do Science want to publish this? It seems that no one had really taken trouble to do detailed measurements on the material before. The researchers (including Sarah Tolbert and Richard Kaner) came at the problem of making a really hard material by working out how to pack enough covalent bonds into a metallic structure and lo and behold, rhenium diboride fitted nicely.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 07:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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. Nevermind, I was treated to an advance showing of one of the talks yesterday. I have to admit, I was skeptical, 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.

In spite of all the disdain that the field is treated with, the cold fusion people I met were all very positive cheerful people, all completely convinced by their research and with what look like compelling arguments. Even the programme chair for this session (not a cold fusion scientist) told me that he was impressed by the results being presented. He's keeping an open mind on the matter. That's quite a way for the field to come since it was laughed almost out of existence in 1989. Gordon was keen to tell me that since they have been quietly plugging away at their work they have not come under attack in the same way Pons and Fleischmann did. "The silence has been deafening" he said.

Cold fusion? I don't know, but the evidence that something weird is happening is there. Maybe it's time to think about this again...

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 01:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Hello y'all. Apologies for the lack of posts today, I've been immersed 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. But 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 09:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There was a chance for us to "meet George Whitesides" today. It was a 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 himself 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 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hello again - just to remind you that I am posting more over at the Nature Newsblog - do take a look...

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)

"was Boltzmann wrong?" screamed one poster. Well, I couldn't quite remember what Boltzmann had done apart from have a constant named after him, and the details of that were hazy. Wikipedia tells me it's the physical constant that relates temperature to energy. So was he wrong? No, it turns out, he just didn't have to consider nanoscale properties.

Another poster was looking at using titanium dioxide to neutralise astronaut's waste. And I don't mean their used teabags. Yuck. But I suppose they can't all wear nappies all the time.

There was a great poster that detailed how barnacles can be kept off ship's hulls - but I will let you check back later to read a news piece about that...

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 06:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | 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.

Yes, the life of a journalist is a tough one. Here in the ACS press room we are given free pizza. Hooray. But of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch. The pizza was to highlight graduate student Jeffery Moore's research at the University of Maryland. He has tinkered with baking conditions and fermentation processes in dough and shown that longer baking times and higher temperatures lead to more antioxidants forming in the dough.

And that is the very dough they fed us. It might make up for the lack of natural light here in the journalist's cave - surely being outside in the sun and all that vitamin D would be better for us than a pile of greasy pizza - antioxidants or not?

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 01:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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....

... Anyway, on with the story. Lawrence Stephens is professor of natural sciences at Elmira College (apparently the first college to offer degrees to women that were equivalent to men's degrees).

Larry had high hopes for one of his students to crack a particularly tricky chemical synthesis, and was thrilled that said student wanted to do extra work over Thanksgiving. When that student asked if he could leave his solution in the fridge as a final attempt for it to crystalise, Larry said "sure".

It turns out that there was a miscommunication about which fridge was to be used, and the student popped his solution (2 litres of pentane) into a normal fridge in the basic science lab - which also had hydrogen peroxide in it. And the door was firmly closed for 3 days or so. This resulted in a major explosion that gutted the undergrad teaching lab (on a positive note, a brand new and very swanky new lab was built as a replacement).

Now for that personal chime I felt. During my PhD a similar - almost identical thing happened to me. The fridge in my lab - unbeknownst to me - had not been modified so had working electrics inside that cause low flash-point solvents to spark. Oops. My lovely dichloromethane solution never did give me the nice crystals I wanted. But I guess, like Larry, I did get a new lab. (sorry Brian).

As Larry put it, there is a lesson to be learned "we shouldn't have household refrigerators in our labs". Wise words indeed.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Hi from the ACS. I'm reporting for news@nature while I'm here, and you can read it all here.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 01:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week's Nature is stuffed full of chemistry. My favourite is a paper by Jeff Moore about mechanically pulling apart chemical bonds.

A news story about the paper can be found here

There are also some videos to go with the story.

Oh, and I am going to be reporting from the ACS meeting in Chicago, so hope to see you there...

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was asked if Dave Leigh's latest paper in this week's Nature was all that special after all - Leigh claimed to have recreated James Clerk Maxwell's famous thought experiment about the second law of thermodynamics and a demon (read the news story I wrote here). But in reality, Leigh didn't actually recreate the demon, he made a molecular machine that can force a system to go against chemical equilibrium after being inspired by Maxwell. Is that so special?

Some would say yes, very much so. And not just by battling against equilibrium. The complexity demonstrated in Leigh's system is unprecedented. His machine cleverly traps the ring of his rotaxane at one binding site on the axle when light is shone on the system, skewing the ratio of molecules with the ring on one site or the other away from equilibrium. Easy to say, but the synthesis I was told by one eminent person in the field, "outstrips anything that a traditional synthetic chemist can achieve."
Are complex systems like Leigh's the future for chemistry? If chemistry begins to re-create natural processes with mechanical machines, rather than just mimicing natural molecules, what will this mean for the field as a whole? Exciting times beckon.

Katharine Sanderson, (physical sciences reporter, Nature)
ps this is my first post, and while my credentials are being checked I am going undercover as Stuart Cantrill

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)