Welcome to the periodic table Copernicium!
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. Read more
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. Read more
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. Read more
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. Read more
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. Read more
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. Read more
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.** … Read more
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… … Read more
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. Read more
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. Read more
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. Read more
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