John Spevacek is at Aspen Research, and works on thiol-ene polymerization, mostly with UV initiation.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

In grade school, I wanted to grow up and become a mad scientist, blowing up the lab everyday just for the devious fun of it. While I did become a chemist, I have scaled back on the rest of that dream somewhat (no explosions yet, just a few very small fires).

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be – and why?

A professional bicycle racer. Not as a Tour de France rider, but a one-day-race rider, competing in Paris-Roubaix or Fleche Wallone. Anytime I ride my bike, I feel young.

3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?

We are looking to incorporate more non-petroleum based chemicals and materials into our products. Petrochemicals will be around far longer than most of the doomsday predictions we hear, but they will become increasingly expensive. This will make it easier to economically justify alternatives, and if the economics aren’t there, large-scale production just won’t occur. I’m also excited that these new sources of materials (microbes, algae…) will give me access to monomers that are otherwise too difficult and expensive to produce from petroleum resources.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with – and why?

Benjamin Franklin would be wonderful as he was involved in so many areas of science, government and diplomacy. Plus I could rib him about getting the direction for flow of electrons wrong, while Emil Fischer, a chemist, got the stereochemistry of sugars correct.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab – and what was it?

As my company doesn’t employ many technicians, I am constantly in the lab. Don’t considered that a complaint. Being in the lab is the other activity that makes me feel young. I am always trying different combinations of monomers and photoinitiators in order to change the properties of the final polymer. The latest effort is to use a bio-based material as a chemical feedstock, not just as a filler or a reinforcing agent. The challenge is that the material is not pure and has multiple reaction sites. Finding the appropriate reaction conditions is far more challenging than when you get your chemicals in labelled bottles.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one music album would you take with you?

Choosing the book would be difficult. There are so few that I would like to reread, and I wouldn’t want to take a chance on an unread book. The collected plays of Shakespeare would be a safe bet, and “The Tempest” would be the most appropriate, wouldn’t it?

As for the album, that’s a much easier choice: Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto, recorded by Jean-Ives Thibaudet, classical music that I didn’t know about until my wife introduced me to it.

7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions – and why?

Professor Robert Bryant of the University of Virginia. He taught my freshman chemistry class at the University of Minnesota in 1980-81, a class for which my high school had left me woefully underprepared. With his help, I survived quite well and have had an enjoyable career, so I’m curious as to what his answers would be.

When officers in the Army Corp of Engineers get a new job, they get more than new offices.

Last week, the corp held a “Change of Command ceremony” at historic Faneuil Hall in Boston were District Commander Col. Tom Feir passed the command flag – signifying change of command authority – to new District Commander Col. Charles P. Samaris, a veteran of the first Iraq war, Desert Storm.

The Corp often gets involved in shoreline management project, so they are busy here in New England. Here are some of their projects:

• Blackstone River Watershed Restoration Study :The Blackstone River, runs from Worcester through Rhode Island before reaching the sea. It powered the mills that once dominated the industrialized region. They used it as a dump for excess dye and heavy metals, which have since settled on the riverbed,. The Corps wants to keep them there.

The feasibility study has been evaluating alternatives that help to reduce the impact of contaminated sediments throughout the watershed by reducing resuspension of the most problematic sediments, while also restoring and creating fish and wildlife habitat.

Aquatic Ecosystem Restoration Project Milford Pond, Milford, Massachusetts.

Milford Pond is a 120-acre pond located in Milford which has been impacted by sedimentation. The proposed federal action is to restore approximately 45 acres of Milford Pond to a maximum depth of 12 feet by hydraulically dredging up to 400,000 cubic yards of accumulated sediment and organic deposits form the pond. Only limited areas of the pond will be dredged to avoid impact to emergent wetland vegetation and potential habitat for waterfowl and wading birds, including State-listed rare species.

More on the new boss from the Corps Press release:

A native of Methuen, Mass., Col. Samaris is a graduate of the University of Miami (Fla.), with a bachelor’s degree in architecture…Some challenges the new commander will face in New England include permit and regulatory activities, navigation improvements, environmental restoration projects, clean up at formerly used defense sites, dredging needs of ports and harbors in New England and many other issues.

— Parents are waiting too long to have ‘the talk’ with their teens. A study in the January issue of Pediatrics found that more than 40% of teens had sex before any discussion of the subject with their parents. Expect an increase in banana purchases these next few days, as proper condom use, in particular, was not discussed. (US News & World Report)

— The US Food and Drug Administration has asked manufacturers to develop a plan for reigning in opioid abuse. Physicians prescribing these pain killers must be certified by the country’s Drug Enforcement Administration, and concerns have developed that doctors might find any new regulation a pain itself and instead opt out. (For more on this, see our earlier coverage of the opioid debate.) (Reuters)

— Cargill, the largest producer of ground beef in the US, is in the midst of testing out a vaccine against dangerous strains of Escherichia coli (E. coli) in cattle. Approved by the country’s Agriculture Department this past March, Epitopix has not been priced yet; however, another vaccine already approved in Canada could cost up to $10 per animal. Cargill might find that price easier to swallow since a Minnesota woman sued the company for $100 million last Friday over an E. coli infection that left her in a wheelchair. (NYTimes, USA Today)

— In 2002, concerns over sex selection in India, where baby boys are favored, led the country to place a ban on technology and advertising that supports this practice. Now Google and Yahoo are under fire in India for carrying ads for sex-selection practices offered by providers outside the country. On the heels of the Michelle Obama controversy, Google might again have to search for ‘solution.’ (Hindustan Times via BioEdge)

Posted on behalf of Christian Torres, Nature Medicine news intern

Image by Diego Cupolo via Flickr creative commons

Whenever I see Elaine Ostrander talk about dogs, I feel sorry for human geneticists. Ostrander, a researcher at the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute on Bethesda, Maryland, studies the hundreds of dog breeds that exist in the world. And because human breeders have simplified dog genetics enormously, it’s a lot easier to answer questions about the genetic basis of all kinds of traits in dogs than it is in humans.

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More elderly readers of these pages may remember having heard in their school days back (circa 1970s) that scientists then thought an ice age would be coming soon. I certainly do – even though the alleged ‘global cooling consensus’ in the scientific literature of the time has recently been disproved as a myth.

Now an interesting new paper in Nature [subscription] suggests that a rapid natural transition towards a stable glacial climate, with permanent ice sheets covering large parts of North America and Eurasia, could indeed be ahead.

Thomas Crowley and William Hyde ran a coupled energy-balance/ice-sheet model to test their hypothesis. When forced with long-term variations in daily solar radiation which result from small cyclical changes in the Earth’s orbit, the best-fit model run (that is the one which most accurately reproduced ice sheet variations during the last 3 million years) predicted a rapid transition towards a cold climate regime to occur merely some 10,000 to 100,000 years from now.

Models and theory do indeed suggest that at critical points (namely when climate variability is at a maximum) large ice sheets can rapidly develop from very small perturbations in solar forcing.

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