['Cross-posted' from issue 3, this is our editorial that explains some of the innovations in the HTML versions of our articles. We'd really like as much feedback as possible, so comment away! Apologies for any formatting weirdness]

The publication of scientific discoveries remained tied to ink and paper for over 300 years, but the rise of the internet over the past few decades has transformed scholarly communication. Just how far this revolution can go depends not just on publishers, but on authors and readers too.

Although much has changed since 1665, when the first issue of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society was published, the basic unit of scientific communication is not all that different. The role of an editor at Nature Chemistry is one that Henry Oldenburg, the first editor of Phil. Trans., would probably recognise. But now that most people read journal articles that they have downloaded from the web, rather than pulled down from a shelf, the article itself — not just its delivery — is on the verge of major changes. Some of these are linked to the vision of Tim Berners-Lee and others for the future of the internet — the semantic web[1, 2]. In this concept, information is labelled in such a way that computers can understand what it is, rather than just humans, as is generally the case at the moment.

Rather than the HTML version of the article being a narrow reflection of the printed page, it can offer enhancements beyond clicking to bring up figures or references — which simply mimics how people can flick through hardcopies anyway. Enhancements that further enrich articles are already being offered by other publishers, including the Royal Society of Chemistry with Project Prospect[3]. Among other services, this highlights words that are terms in the IUPAC Gold Book and links to their definitions. Beyond simply being an educational tool, this also means that papers on similar concepts are linked together. Apart from the fledgling ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry[4], there are few other publishers exploiting the full potential of their online articles. Although the American Chemical Society are testing several interesting and useful innovations on the JACS-beta website[5], such as downloadable PowerPoint and ChemDraw files, none of these so far enriches the text of the articles.

Continue reading "Editorial: Beyond the printed page" »

Posted by Neil Withers at 06:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

As announced by the RSC Press Office and the ChemSpider blog, the Royal Society of Chemistry has acquired ChemSpider, the structure-based database.

Gosh. Reaction from the blogosphere has been positive and congratulatory (see the comments on Tony's blog post and Peter Murray-Rust's post).

Richard Kidd, head of the RSC's Informatics department (formerly Production) has also blogged about it on the Chemistry World blog. He says "The ChemSpider service will continue to be free to access on the web" - answering the question that I was planning to ask in this post! Phew.

So that means that ChemSpider's future - previously a tad shaky if Tony had fallen foul of his backyard snakes or his basement flooded - is pretty secure.

It's going to be interesting to see how this develops: ChemSpider has been the new kid on the block (compared to the venerable Beilstein, Gmelin, Chemical Abstracts etc), but now it has the equally venerable RSC backing it up. I imagine adding the RSC's extensive archive (dating from 1841, nearly 1.5 million pages) would add a hefty chunk of data.

[And not a single bad spider-related joke spun out of this post...]

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 07:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Just a quick heads-up for the second issue.

Apart from a stunning cover and some very interesting research articles (which have attracted quite a few write-ups elsewhere), there's a good mix of 'front-half' articles too.

The prolific Derek Lowe reviews the book Drug Truths: Dispelling the Myths About Pharma R&D by John L. LaMattina, the former head of Pfizer's global R+D - what he doesn't know about developing new drugs could probably be quite easily tweeted!

Blogroll covers a subject that, as an editor, I'd never thought caused so much heartache: Acknowledgements. Negotiating the political mine-field is obviously harder than I thought...

One of our soon-to-be-regular Thesis writers is Michelle Francl (you may read her blog The Culture of Chemistry - I do) and her first article reflects on a subject dear to this blog's heart, the periodic table. See how long it takes you to work out what her sibling wrote on the postcard.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 07:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The second chemistry@nature podcast of 2009 is freshly minted and ready to download! You can also find it on iTunes, if that's how you get your ChemPod fix.

Brian Shoichet from UCSF tells us how to use computer modelling to speed up the screening process for new drugs. Nature News' Katharine Sanderson talks us through a very cool sounding tiny DNA machine that can measure the pH inside cells, and our very own Catherine Goodman reports on the recent ACS meeting.

But that's not all - Stu pops up at the end to introduce a Nature Chemistry competition. This time we're giving away goodie bags filled with posters, lab coats, t-shirts, yo-yos, etc - and even copies of the first issue. All you have to do is email your best chemistry limerick to podcast@nature.com - the best five will get the goodies!

Happy listening.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 04:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

How many lithium-ion batteries do you own? Let me see, I have one mobile/cell phone, one laptop, two digital cameras and one brick-like MP3 player (not to mention several old phones gathering dust somewhere) - they're all rechargable, so the chances are they're powered by lithium-ion batteries. So that's at least 5. Multiply that by everyone in the developed world and you've got a lot of lithium.

But where does all that lithium come from? I must confess to having no idea. Then I came across the following article in The Daily Mail: In search of Lithium: The battle for the 3rd element. A lot of it is under a desert in Bolivia, and if we're all "going to be driving electric cars in the future" (or, more realistically, using a lot more Li-ion batteries generally), it's going to have to mined.

Although I can't believe I'm linking to Daily Mail story in a serious way, the article is pretty good, and worth looking at the for the dramatic desert pictures alone. I shall also (grudgingly) applaud them for (a) covering science in this way and (b) explaining how lithium-ion batteries work - with a graphic.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

This just popped up in the JACS-beta feed in my RSS reader: Mobile TOC Available.

They've created a simple table of contents — see this example for one of their web themed/select issues — that you can more easily view on a mobile device. You can then select the articles that you're interested in, and save them as favourites to your ACS profile. When you're back in the lab/office, you can find them all again.

It's not quite as far as being able to read whole issues on...your iPhone, as The Chem Blog mentioned when JACS-beta was first launched, but for the time-poor chemist, it's a pretty good start.

Thinking about it though, my phone's got an RSS reader built in, so I guess I could get the feeds and mark those I wanted to read for later anyway. However, I still don't think that so many people are actually using RSS feeds (and I don't think a sample of blog readers would be representative!), so they may be more happy using a browser.

Does this innovation strike a chord with you? Is it something you'd use - and that we should ask our nature.com IT masters for?! Are you browsing journals or reading papers on the move already? If so, how?

Speaking of time-poor researchers, chemists or otherwise, I really recommend reading Being Bob Langer from a few weeks ago in Big Nature. He is one seriously busy man - I felt exhausted just reading it.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 07:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The first issue is now live, and freely available for everyone to read and (hopefully) enjoy.

Stu and Gav are flying off to Salt Lake City as I type for the Spring ACS Meeting. And tomorrow, Anne goes to Tokyo to work there from now on, and will also be visiting the Japanese Chemical Society Meeting starting next week. Feel free to visit the stand at the ACS exposition or to chat to the editors as they make their jetlagged way around!

I shan't copy and paste the entire table of contents here, but apart from what will be the usual mix of research articles, reviews, news & views and research highlights, there are a few extras that I'll draw attention to.

Most apt to The Sceptical Chymist is Blogroll - it's tucked away in a column next to the Research Highlights and is a quick overview of what's caught our eye in the blogosphere recently. Who knows, one of your posts or comments could be in there...

One of the most exciting things in the first issue is the feature The future of chemistry. We asked eight leading lights to write about what they see as the future of their discipline and it adds up to a very interesting read.

Finally, as is really well outlined by Egon at Chem-bla-ics, lots of the papers contain data-rich 'compound pages'. In them you can click on a bold compound number to view a full structure, with InChIs, links to PubChem, etc.

But wait, there's more! Some of the papers have even more than that. If you click on the 'Show compounds' link in the right-hand navigation, compound names in the text will appear highlighted. Clicking on them then reveals links to PubChem and ChemSpider. Thanks to everyone who commented on our previous posts - the feedback was listened to.

So there we are! Almost 14 months since Stu became Chief Ed, ~50 weeks after Gav, Steve and I started, ~6 months after Anne started and at the end of our Technical Editor, Laura's 3rd week, we have an issue. Apparently, we have to do this EVERY MONTH!

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 06:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Following the lead of Nature Materials, we've gone and got a Twitter feed. I don't know if we really know what to do with it yet though! Feel free to follow us, and suggest what we should use it for. Maybe when we're all out and about at conferences later in the year it'll be more useful.

Meanwhile, our latest paper published online has received a pleasing amount of coverage in the wider press, including C&EN, Chemistry World, the MIT Tech Review and even the New York Times. Now you've read the journalists' take, make up your own mind about attolitre reaction vessels from polymer nanofibres.

Even with all this going on we certainly haven't forgotten to bring you our latest picks of the pops in the form of Research Highlights. This week we feature five-fold symmetric corannulenes forming 2D crystals, how the surface oxygen coverage of gold catalysts influences their selectivity and how polymers can act as a TLC-like 'stationary phase' and separate NMR spectra of mixtures.

Phew. Easily sailing into this week's 'And finally...' section is the Nano Song. This simply wonderful music video is an entry for the ACS Nanotation 'What is "nano"?' competition. Go and vote now!

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It probably hasn't escaped the notice of UK-based readers that the winners of University Challenge, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, have been stripped of their crown, after it turned out that one of the team was no longer a student when the final rounds were filmed.

The guilty party was studying chemistry (I read somewhere that he got a first) and graduated after the first two rounds had been recorded. This has attracted vast swathes of media attention, partly because the final itself was jolly exciting and partly because of the media coverage of the vastly intelligent love/hate figure, Corpus Christi captain Gail Trimble. Check out some of the clips on YouTube.

Apart from the reasonably tenuous link to chemistry, I thought this needed blogging about (not just because I was once on the show - and I managed to read and understand the rules) because it reminded me of the host, Jeremy Paxman, and his generally poor knowledge of science (compared to his impressive knowledge of other areas).

Some lapses, like the 2 or 3 takes pronouncing 'superfluidity', I can forgive, but all too often he gives teams the points for science answers that are just wrong, but sound a bit similar. Such as 'momentum', when the answer was 'angular momentum'. He'd never let them get away with saying Anne Brontë, not Emily, wrote Wuthering Heights. I suppose it's another reflection of The Two Cultures - but that doesn't mean to say I have to like it!

Other angles you might like to discuss amongst yourselves: someone with a first in chemistry from Oxford goes to work for PWC, even in today's credit-crunched climate, happily abandoning science for accountancy. Oxbridge colleges getting separate entry into University Challenge. Would the media whirlwind around 'cleverest ever contestant' Gail Trimble have been so frenzied had she been male? I can practically hear the dissertations being written across the country!

To shoe-horn in some proper chemistry, I've noticed that both Chemistry World and Angewandte Chemie have articles about the periodic table (subscriptions required for both). The CW one is slightly lighter reading, so I haven't got through the Angewandte one just yet. But it's interesting to see slightly different takes on this icon of chemistry. Here's a trivia snippet to whet your appetite: it was only in the 1940s that Glenn Seaborg rescued the actinides from being 'inner transition elements'.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 08:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Graham Richards, former head of chemistry at Oxford ('the largest chemistry department in the western world', don't forget), has a new book out, and is interviewed in the Guardian here.

He's a computational chemist - and has been since computers were the size of rooms - and has spun out two pretty succesful companies, Isis Innovation and Oxford Molecular (now part of Accelrys). The interview is an interesting read, and touches on the trouble with funding bodies, venture capitalists and the higher education boom in the UK in the 1960s.

On my travels last year I particuarly enjoyed talking to academics about how different universities exploit their research. The Weizmann Institute impressed me the most: the head of chemistry, Yehiam Prior told me that about 1/3 of their funding comes from exploiting their intellectual property - and they've been doing it for about 30 years. And I think the academics themselves get to keep about 50% of the cash, with the remaining 50% going straight to the department - the Institute overall doesn't see a shekel.

Spotters badge to Dan Cressey at The Great Beyond.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 05:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So here it is...Research Highlights, everybody's having fun. But before we all disappear for Christmas, here are the final RHs of the year.

I covered a pretty smart idea for a class of biosensors. Reducing cynanine dyes means they don't fluoresce, until they come into contact with the nasty reactive oxygen species that mess around with cells. Even cleverer, the reduced forms can slip in and out cells willy-nilly, whereas the fluorescing ones are trapped inside the cells, showing you where the problem is.

You might well have seen this one elsewhere, but now you can read Tim's take on the biomimetic material that's thin and strong - it's all about the ice templating, you know.

Last, but by no means whatsoever least, it's a nifty idea for what could become 'TLC for solid-supported synthesis'. And it involves magnetically levitating beads!

And finally...unlike the BMJ we haven't got a load of spurious research to make it into the news-light festive season newspapers - watch out for next year though - and we're a week before the RSC releases the same story about hangover cures for the 3rd or 4th year running, so I'll leave you with some mathematical clues to help you wrap presents better!

See you all in the New Year - thanks for all the comments in 2008!

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 05:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pop over to the Big Nature news blog The Great Beyond to see what element people want for Christmas...there's a video too.

Personally, I'd like some helium, to keep everyone entertained with squeaky voices while we're waiting for the turkey to cook.

Posted by Neil Withers at 09:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday was the 5th of November, which means thousands — nay millions — of people in the UK spent last night looking up at drizzly skies going 'Ooooh!' and 'Aaaah!' at successive fireworks. It's all thanks to a plot 400 years ago to blow up the Houses of Parliament (or is it?)

Now, hands up all the readers whose formative experiences as chemists involve burning things? Thought so — me too! One of my lecturers took this further than most, however, and used to bring home-made gunpowder into lecture theatres to compare to commercial bangers. There wasn't much sleeping in HIS lectures — or people sitting on the front row.

So, fire, bangs, colours - what more could one want? Think of all that chemistry that's going on... Thanks to a few excellent websites, I now know that strontium and lithium salts are responsible for red, calcium for orange, sodium for yellow, barium for green, copper for blue and iron is gold (eh?). The crackling showers of white sparks are created by titanium flakes: the noise is caused by the thin layer of oxide cracking as the metal inside melts. Thousands of years since they were first invented, gunpowder is still used to provide both the whizz of the flight and the bang of the subsequent explosion.

All this might seem pretty simple (C + S + KNO₃) stuff, but I remember from Dr Ludman's course just how complicated the reactions were — and how hard to balance in the homework! And all those tightly packed solids give off [relatively] vast volumes of gases in a splurge of energy and entropy.

So the next time you see some fireworks — real or not — spare a thought for the creative chemists with some of the best jobs in the world.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Thanks to a comment by John Brockley on a New Scientist story about hoaxes, I've just discovered a fascinating paper. I've only got an abstract of it, published in The Analyst in 1944 (vol. 69, p. 97 - possibly free access thanks to the RSC's archive), because the original work was published in Bull. Bureau Chemical Investigation (New York State Police, Dec. 1943, 8). I don't think we subscribe!

Anyway, the article: Toxicological Significance of Laevorotatory Ice Crystals. The researcher, J. Beeman, isolates laevorotatory (left-handed) ice crystals from the right-handed by dissolving them in alcohol. "Quantitative toxicity studies showed that laevorotatory ice had a toxic index of +3.45 and the dextrorotatory ice an index of -3.45." The left-handed crystals were injected into animal subjects, and they showed some quite unpleasant symptons: "diarrhoea, foul breath, rapid pulse and bulging eyes", as well as being 'extremely irritable'.

Now for the fun part: human subjects! "In human expts. 1 litre of commercial brandy was ingested in 3 hr. in 60-ml doses with a 2.5-cm cube of [left-handed] ice." Perhaps unsuprisingly, the subjects showed some pretty extreme symptoms! "In the acutely poisoned subject, the sight and odour of an alcoholic beverage produced reflex nausea; in some cases the subject developed a split personality." Fortunately, "Relief was afforded by cold milk and by aspirin (0.3g every 30min.)."

One litre of brandy! Can you imagine doing that experiment?! My mind is boggling. So next time you've got a hangover, blame the ice cubes...

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 08:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Happy Chemistry Nobel Prize day everyone!

The winners are:

Osamu Shimomura
Martin Chalfie
Roger Y. Tsien

"for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP"

This is just a very brief post to let you know the result as it came in - a full research highlight will follow later today!

UPDATE (1430 GMT): And Stu's piece is now live, so read it here.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 05:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

As you're reading this, I bet you've also read some of our Reactions interviews. In amongst the 'Desert Island Discs'/lifestyle questions is number 3: How can chemists best contribute to the world at large? The answers to this weighty question are always fascinating and quite wide ranging.

Now, the Royal Society of Chemistry (the UK's professional body and learned society for chemists - yes, they did just try to rename the LHC) is trying to put together a roadmap to answer the question - or at least how they prioritise their output to help achieve such a goal. The process has been going on since March, and is now in its second online consultation period.

Anyone - not just RSC members, but any chemistry stakeholder - can register at the website and get their thoughts taken on board.

The thing that strikes me is that the level of detail is pretty impressive. Each of the seven main themes (such as energy, water, public engagement and trust) is further broken down into subthemes, which are then taken down to the nitty-gritty. For instance, picking the first option each time: Energy:Biofuels:Additives to maximise biofuel efficiency group.

After another round of online consultation in November, the final report will be submitted to the RSC General Assembly before the roadmap is launched in December and implementation begins. It looks as if the RSC is going to a serious amount of effort to make sure it's going in the right direction - I'll be interested to see what the outcomes are in December. (Although hopefully in a very condensed form - the 'summary report' of the first phase is 90 pages!)

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 08:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It can't have escaped your notice that our marketing campaign is focussing on the periodic table - various elements are represented in a more graphical form. So far, we've had a flaming O, sparkly and blinging C, stripey toothpaste F, etc. We're not far from being able to make words out of the postcards on our office wall!

Which got us thinking...what's the longest word you can spell only using elements? Gav is very proud to have got his team's name: SUNdErLaNd, but less pleased when I countered with their great rivals NeWCAsTlEuNiTeD! OK, so D is for deuterium...

I'm struggling to spell my name at all and won't even attempt my football team (I can get as far as tungsten and oxygen). Steve says that he once used a compound database that tried to work out what UNKNOWN was - a complex oxynitride, no doubt.

I'd love to be able to offer a prize for the longest word, but I'll have to limit it to what my physics teacher used to award: self-esteem and the respect of your peers!

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 09:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Are you sitting comfortably? To welcome in the weekend, there's a new Chempod! The July/August edition is available to download at the usual place. You can probably subscribe to it via iTunes, but I'm not trendy enough to know how.

This one features some reports from the recent ACS meeting in Philadelphia, where sustainability was on the agenda - hence the green theme in the show. New(ish) Nature Nanotechnology editor Owain Vaughan talks about his paper that recently appeared in Nature - on seriously small gold catalysts. Look out for a Reactions piece from him in the future...

Somewhat less impressively, I also make a slightly cringe-worthy appearance to promote our Facebook group, and the famous lab-coat photocompetition!

Thanks for listening,
Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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

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

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

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

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

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

Shalom from Jerusalem, where I'm attending the 38th International Conference on Coordination Chemistry (or ICCC38 as it is thankfully abbreviated to).

The conference has only been going for a day, but here's a thought to keep you going: ENERGY.

Quite a big and important thought, but fortunately for the world, some of the world's top chemists are thinking about it pretty deeply. In yesterday's opening plenary lecture, Harry Gray of Caltech talked about his search to find cheaper alternatives to ruthenium-based dye-senstized solar cells. Ending on positive note, he told us he had secured funding for a project involving about 20-30 institutions across America (and BP in the UK). Even more positively, he then told all the young chemists in the audience to go out and make sure that in the future we can make everything we need from nitrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen and sea-water, using solar power.

And Richard Schrock of MIT (didn't he win a prize a few years ago...?) finished today by discussing his long-standing battle to make a catalyst that can convert nitrogen to ammonia. But what's that got to do with energy, I hear you ask. Well, the Haber-Bosch process, developed almost 100 years ago and still used to create a staggering 100 million tons of ammonia a year today, consumes a whopping 1.4% of the world's energy. He isn't quite there yet, because the reaction is barely stoichiometric let alone catalytic. But he's working on it and left the audience thinking on the problems he (or rather his ligands) needs to overcome. Oh, and that's before you get the necessary hydrogen from splitting water with sunlight...

Don't hold your breath, but we might get there in the end.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 02:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

OK OK, it's another periodic table - but we're CHEMISTS and we love 'em. This one really is quite different though.

Martyn Poliakoff and his colleagues at Nottingham University have got together with video journalist Brady Haran to create short videos about every single element. It's still a work in progress, but they're only missing 20. The Daily Telegraph describes the clips as 'lively' and containing 'explosive experiments that are now rarely carried out in British schools' - you have been warned!

You can even subscribe to the YouTube feed to be notified when they upload new ones.

For those hungry for more explosions, we can recommended searching for Group 1 or 2 metals on YouTube...

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 08:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Morning everyone, it's Research Highlights time.

First up, Gav covers a paper from our sister journal, Nature Materials. It's by Michael Grätzel and colleagues, and they've developed stable ionic liquid mixtures to use in solar cells.

Although sniffer dogs aren't out of a job just yet, 'electronic noses' are getting better. Here's one that combines peptides with Si nanowires to sniff out molecules in the gas phase.

A lot of work on porous materials is focused on the size of the pores, but it looks like subtle changes in the materials building blocks can affect the reactivity of guest molecules.

And finally, we love this video of a chemical party that promotes the EU-funded Marie Curie Actions to support 'training and mobility activities for researchers'.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So, the conference is over, but the work of a Nature Chemistry editor isn't. As you might have heard on the podcast, we're combining our conference visits with trips to nearby chemistry departments. So the day after we'd wrapped up DD11, I took the (surprisingly far) journey to Palo Alto on the other side of the San Francisco bay to visit the chemistry department at Stanford University.

This is my first set of lab visits, and my main impression so far is that it's like having a day of one-to-one tutorials with some of the best chemists in the world! I wonder how much you'd have to pay to get that kind of consultancy...?

Another impression is 'interdisciplinary': it's impossible (and essentially worthless) to pigeonhole any of the faculty I met into the traditional disciplines of chemistry. For instance, Chris Chang at Berkeley makes organic molecules so they can interact with inorganic species in the body and then give some sort of physical response!

And so on to the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla (nr San Diego). There's a strong emphasis here on organic chemistry/biochemistry because Scripps is a biomedical research organisation. Again, more interdisciplinary work...apart from Phil Baran, who proudly does undiluted organic chemistry. He has a quote on his wall (and on his homepage) from his Scripps/ETH colleague Albert Eschenmoser, the key part of which is "neither biology nor chemistry would be served best by a development in which all organic chemists would simply become biological". I'd like to think there's space, and funding, for both approaches.

And finally...the Berkeley summer visitor housing I was staying in is right next to the university's Hearst Greek Theatre, and on my last night there, I was treated to a free concert by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant (formerly of Led Zeppelin).

From La Jolla, Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

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Greetings from Berkeley, where I'm attending Dalton Discussion 11: The Renaissance of Main Group Chemistry. RSC discussion meetings are quite different from normal conferences: the speakers have submitted full papers of their work, and a collection of 'pre-prints' of all the papers is given to each delegate to read beforehand. Talks are then limited to about 5 minutes, with around 15-20 mins of discussion to follow. The papers are then published in one issue (in this case of Dalton Transactions) afterwards.

So, what has been discussed? A lot of pretty impressive main group chemistry, including some incredibly sophisticated Al and Ga cluster chemistry by Hansgeorg Schnoeckel. The size of some of these clusters are approaching nanoparticles, only these are molecularly defined - all with the same number of metal atoms. Ian Manners talked about his adventures with inorganic polymers, with alternating P and N rather than boring old carbon.

That's actually a bit of a theme I'm finding: there's a whole host of other elements out there apart from carbon and it's their differences from, rather than their similarities to, carbon that makes the compounds unusual and interesting in so many ways.

There was an interesting and wide-ranging question posed by one of the chairs (Claire Carmalt): does chemistry (and main group chemistry in particular) need applications to justify funding, or should curiosity alone be enough? Most of the delegates thought curiosity was enough, and Chris Reed said that he often answers that question with 'Ask me in 20 years!' He made specific reference to some carboranes that he first made about 20 years ago, but is now using as extremely powerful yet gentle reagents. Someone from Los Alamos (whose name I didn't catch) made the comment that applications demand blue-sky curiosity.

And a final mention must go to yesterday's chair, Malcolm Chisholm, who reminded us of Mark Twain's words that 'the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco'.

Neil, in mercifully sunny Berkeley

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

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It's that time of the week again...

Steve's piece this week is about stereochemistry, and how it can be indirectly transferred from the periphery of a dendrimer to its catalytic core.

Gav highlights a molecular switch that's used to alter the Lewis acidity of a boron compound, by virtue of cross conjugation.

Cross conjugation also features strongly in the final highlight, because it seems that the simple rules for electron transfer don't work for cross-conjugated systems.

Although it's nice to see chemistry getting a prominent mention in this Daily Telegraph article, we're a little concerned about the phrase 'the chicken molecule'! Other things that we've found on the net this week include 'science facebook' and possibly the best online periodic table — what's your site of choice?

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

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Hi everyone,

We thought it was time to show our faces in public and let you know where we're all heading now conference season is upon us.

First to escape the office is Steve, going to ICOS17 in Daejon, Korea, on 22-27 June. On the other side of the world, I'll be attending DD11 in Berkeley on 23-25 June.

Closer to home, Stu's going to a nano meeting in Reading on 26-27 June, before visiting some chemistry deparments in the Mid-West US in July. Steve's next out again, visiting ICOMC23 in Rennes, France, on 13-18 July. Then it's my turn again at ICCC38 in Jerusalem on 20-25 July.

Gav's not being left behind to deal with everything in the office — he's off to the ACS meeting in Philadelphia on 18-21 August. We're also planning some visits to chemistry departments, both in the UK and near the conference venues, spreading the Nature Chemistry word.

We hope to see lots of you on our travels, so feel free to stop us for a chat. We might even give you some free post-it notes...

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

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For those people who like their balls to be leather/polyurethane rather than bucky, it can't have escaped your notice that the 2008 European Championships are underway in Switzerland and Austria. We have the obligatory fantasy football league in the office, with Steve and Gav doing considerably better than I am.

In a desperate attempt to tie football to chemistry for a blog post, I've noticed a link between certain key points in my education/career and major football matches/tournaments The link began in 1996, when my final school exam (AS-level Further Maths) was on the same day as England beating Holland 4-1 at Wembley in Euro 96. The World Cup in France in 1998 is forever linked to my 2nd–3rd year dissertation (Bond length–bond strength relationships in chemistry) — mornings in the library carrying bound volumes of pre-1940 JACS up from the basement to read articles by Linus Pauling were followed by afternoons and evenings watching football. I missed the first half of Manchester United's 1999 Champions League triumph while revising for my last 3rd year exam.

Euro 2000 is even more painfully etched on my memory: all in one day I discovered I had a viva exam to determine my final grade (9am), sat the exam (11ish), got the result (4ish) and watched England get knocked out by Romania (9ish). Not a fun 12 hours! I spent the 2002 World Cup as a somewhat dazed postgraduate, trying to fit watching the early games (the perils of a tournament in Japan and Korea...) before going to the lab. Finally, I had the interview/assessment day for the RSC graduate training scheme on the day of a friendly between England and Japan in the build-up to Euro 2004 and watched the final (cliched plucky underdogs Greece beating hosts Portugal) in Cambridge during a weekend trying to find somewhere to live before I started work.

Lots of my friends have similar stories (dashing through the deserted streets of Edinburgh after an exam during Brazil v Scotland in 1998, or walking out of their final exam into the bar upstairs for the opening match in 2002), so let's have yours!

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 05:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Time for our next trio of research highlights

It might not have escaped your notice that some people have made a new family of high-Tc superconductors...here's a piece about the 43 K samarium one. Of course, this field is moving terrifying quickly at the moment, so I'm sure my story's out of date by now! The physics pre-print server ArXiv for this area is about as up to date as you're going to get.

Proteins that have unfolded, or folded up the wrong way, are responsible for some pretty nasty diseases (Alzheimer's, CJD), so being able to re-fold them to more or less their original state would be quite handy - this one's about gold nanoparticles used to that effect.

All you synthetic organic chemistry junkies out there will no doubt be big fans of the Suzuki-Miyaura coupling already, but have you thought about trying it with simple aryl methyl ethers? These guys have...

And finally, here's a link that will make you very glad you're a chemist. The headline says it all: Zombie caterpillars controlled by voodoo wasps. There's even a movie for the iron-stomached among you.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 05:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Morning everyone, Friday can only mean one thing.

First up is a pretty clever idea: a supramolecular capsule with pores that can open and close. Some pretty obvious advantages for controlled release.

Next to be covered is a paper from Science that you might have seen highlighted elsewhere: a nifty spectroscopic technique where they vibrationally excite a molecule before studying its rotational spectrum. It's so fast you can look at both isomers of a molecule - and all the states in between.

And finally, a polymer whose phase transition involves such a large change in length that a fibre is able to make an object 250 times its weight move on uphill. The object is a US dime, so there are potential uses in piggy banks across the world!

I hope you enjoy this week's batch - time for me to edit next week's...

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 04:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Morning everyone, it's research highlight time!

Apart from having a really cheesy headline(credit goes to Gav), my piece is on a double-whammy in silicon chemistry: the first compound with two C=Si double bonds AND the first metal-substituted silene — in the same compound.

Steve tackles some total synthesis, writing about Phil Baran's assault on (+)-cortistatin A, where they had to use a side door to access a ring-expanding cascade. There's more about this over on Totally Synthetic.

And finally...how are your knees? If they're suffering from osteoarthritis or acute pseudogout, chances are they've got crystals of calcium phosphate in them. Read Gav's highlight about how the crystal culprits can be detected with magnetic beads.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 04:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm sure all you dilligent up-to-the-minute literature-lovers out there have just received your Journal of the American Society table of contents alert for issue 21. I trust you noticed the little ad for 'JACS-β' and the editorial...

JACS has launched a beta website, which includes a 'virtual thematic web issue' (on total synthesis), downloadable PowerPoint slides of all the figures/schemes of an article and (gulp) "Listen to the complete text of selected JACS communications." For real.

Personally, my favourite part is the 'What kind of smartphone do you use?' type of questionnaire along the RHS. Facebook-tastic!

A bit more seriously, it's good to see JACS getting a bit 2.0 (or indeed 21st century) on us - everyone likes a theme issue now and then (although web-only means you don't get a nice hard copy to refer to endlessly), and I bet a lot of lecturers will like the PowerPoint slides, but...podcasts of full-on research articles? I haven't listened to one yet, but might save one for the commute soon - anyone else tuned in and care to let us know what they think?

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Morning everyone, here are this week's research highlights:

Viscosity is a property that's easy to think about on the bulk scale (pouring syrup compared to water, for example), but it's less easy to get your head around it on a molecular scale. But using a molecular rotor, viscosity can be measured within cells...

Heard of the Eshelby twist? No, it's not a 1950s dance craze, but a type of crystal defect, and it can be exploited to make some very pretty looking nanotrees...

And finally this week, a subject quite dear to my heart: solid-state synthesis. Having spent rather a long and frustating time during my PhD trying (and failing) to make a whole raft of compounds that calculations predicted should exist, I'm glad to see that other people have been successful in making a new polymorph of lithium bromide — exactly as predicted.

Enjoy.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 04:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Another Friday, another batch of Research Highlights for you all to enjoy.

Steve's is about a pretty clever hydrogel. Hydrogels are potential carriers for drugs, but how do you get them to release their cargo in the right place? Aptamers are the answer...

Gav has written about some work by Richard Zare's group that looks at how viruses might 'break in' to cells. They used surface plasmon resonance to study a model virus attaching itself to a model cell.

And finally...oligoamide foldamers are strings of amides or amino acids that...well, fold up. A bit like proteins or DNA do. But if you can get them to fold AROUND something, you can use them to trap molecules. Jane tells us more about work done to this end in France and China.

Hope you enjoy this crop - if you have any feedback or comments, please let us know!

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 04:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hi everyone,

This week the Nature Chemistry team have been thinking about how we display our wonderful papers (when we finally open the doors and eventually publish a paper, anyway).

We’d really like to see what everyone else thinks about some of the things we discussed after looking at what other journals have to offer.

So, the things we’re interested in:

(1) HTML vs PDF: does anyone read the HTML articles? Do you read the PDF on-screen or print it out?

(2) Big vs little graphics: what does everyone else think about the tiny size of the graphics in ACS html articles?

(3) Tagging/’semantic web’: what do you think about the toys on the RSC’s Project Prospect? What kind of things would you like to see tagged/linked to other content in Nature Chemistry? For instance, Steve would love to do something with named reactions.

(4) 3D molecular structures: do these help your understanding of a paper?

(5) How useful to you are InChIs and SMILES?

(6) Forward linking: the RSC and Elsevier/Science Direct offer this – do you use it? Would you use an RSS feed that alerted you to new citations of a particular paper.

(7) Would you actually comment on papers if there was a comments box at the end?

(8) We really like the Biochemical Society’s HTML article style (sample one here) – do you?

If we could get a deluge of posts about this one, we’d be overjoyed! And this is your chance to voice your opinion on what a Nature Chemistry paper should look like.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 06:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (18) | TrackBacks (0)

Happy Friday everyone, and welcome to this week's batch of research highlights.

Fullerenes:
Buckyballs act just like giant atoms, complete with s, p and d orbitals that are bound to the sphere's hollow centre

Antitumour agents:
Hiding a potent, but insoluble, anticancer drug inside a cage complex represents a new approach to the use of inorganic chemotherapeutics

Self-assembly:
Discrete complexes comprising stacks of up to nine aromatic molecules can be assembled in one step from a few simple building blocks

As for last week, anyone can read the articles for free, but you need to sign up for a free account first.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 05:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We've just received a press release letting us know that the Diamond Light Source ('the UK's world-class synchrotron facility') has just had its first users on its new test beamline (B16 for all you big facility junkies out there!). This is only the 8th of the 40 planned beamlines.

The lucky scientists are from Royal Holloway, University of London, and they're developing high-res XRD techniques to map crystal imperfections. Moreton Moore (who Google reveals is also a Councillor on Runymede Borough Council) has spent a large part of his career studying...diamonds. Not just a girl's best friend, industrial diamonds can contain tiny inclusions of metal that could cause failure. So being able to separate out the elements within the metal using the hard X-rays from Diamond could lead to better industrial diamonds.

The new test beamline's job is to allow researchers (academic and industrial) to test their optical components. Kawal Sawhney, Principal Beamline Scientist, said 'It enables us to push our capabilities and advance the technology that is available to users, without interrupting the schedule of the other beamlines, ultimately resulting in better, cutting-edge science.'

Having used the neutron source at ISIS (on GEM and HRPD) and the old synchrotron source at Daresbury (9.1) in my PhD, I tend to get a bit green-eyed over this sparkling new facility. Daresbury especially was a source of mild dread to us all, probably because of the prospect of running an experiment over 48 hours, in which you need to change the image plate every 20 minutes. This required two of us to stay up until 4am before the other two team members took over. The unfortunate thing is that the furnace broke at around 9am, thus slightly ruining everything. That's to say nothing of the rubber bands and sticky tape that seemed to be holding everything together – or the infamous canteen!

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Hi everyone, I'm Neil, one the new associate editors on Nature Chemistry, and this is my first post here at the Sceptical Chymist. The eagle-eyed chemistry publishing blog aficionados among you may just remember some of my posts over on the Chemistry World blog, about such crucial topics as t-shirts, food and even science.

Today’s topic is inspired by a rather sad story...I found out around Christmas time that my first ever science teacher at my village middle school recently died at a fairly young age of motor neurone disease. So this post is dedicated to the memory of Mr Challinor – Gareth, I believe.

I vividly remember some of his first lessons back when I was a 9 year old, 20 years ago. The school buildings were quite new (10 or so years old at the time), so the little lab was pretty well kitted out. But he really instilled in us the fact that science wasn't about Bunsen burners or any of the other complicated apparatus we were all seeing for the first time. A scientist's most important tools, he said, were his or her eyes, to observe what was happening.

One of the first experiments I remember him showing us was incredibly simple, but also incredibly powerful. He'd told us about atoms, and how burning material was essentially just adding oxygen to it. To prove that things do get heavier once you’ve burned them, he carefully weighed some magnesium foil in a crucible, then set fire to it. After the bright white flame died away, he re-weighed the crucible and guess what? The weight had indeed increased.

As well as teaching us about atoms and combustion, something else he did in that experiment also stands out. He got one of the class (Jamie Preece, since you asked) to watch over his shoulder as he did the weighing (we couldn’t all fit around the balance). This was just to show that he wasn’t making it all up, that we shouldn’t believe him 'just because he said so', but to show what he said had happened actually did. That's a pretty important first lesson in science for anyone, but especially a 9 year old: don’t just take someone's word for it, see for yourself.

So, if anyone else would like to share their first ever experiment with the world, please let us know in the comments below!

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

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