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.

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A couple of papers about some N-containing annulenes have been retracted and/or corrected after it was pointed out to the authors that the reaction they claimed made these exotic rings was actually 103 years old, and that they were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...

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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 (2)