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 (9) | 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)

Posted by Neil Withers at 06:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)