Have you ever wondered how you would evacuate several thousand people from a hangar-sized conference centre in the event of a fire? Well, now I know, because all the fire alarms went off yesterday morning at the Washington Conference Center. I’m pleased to report that there was no mad panic (chemists, of all people, know how to respond to fire-related emergencies) but it has to be said that it does take a long time – the all-clear had been sounded before I made it to the exit. It turned out to be a false alarm, by the way.

I felt sorry for the poor speakers who were interrupted mid-flow by sirens and flashing lights, but an honourable mention must go to the presenter at the session that I was attending: Malika Jeffries-EL handled the interruption with magnificent aplomb. And everybody came back to see the rest of her talk – about the synthesis of benzobisazoles as building blocks for conjugated polymers – once the alarm was over.

Later in the same session, Tehshik Yoon spoke about his work on visible-light-driven photochemical reactions, specifically [2+2] cycloadditions. The key to using visible light for these reactions is the ruthenium catalyst; JACS subscribers can read about some of this work here, in a paper that describes intermolecular cycloadditions. Yoon has now tweaked the chemistry so that it works in crossed intermolecular reactions, and that work is currently in press.

I wonder if visible-light-driven reactions might become something of a theme for the future, as David MacMillan is, of course, also working in this field. He spoke about the development of his photoreactions for the asymmetric alkylation of aldehydes (Science subscribers can read the first paper on this topic here). The latest development in this story will undoubtedly be of interest to medicinal chemists: a method for the trifluoromethylation of aldehydes, which is currently in press.

News from today’s sessions later…

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

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

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

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

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

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

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