Monthly Archives: September 2010

It’s that time of the year again…

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So, it’s Nobel season once more and I thought I’d share with you what that means in the Nature Chemistry office.

As many readers of this blog might know, we publish two research highlights each Friday. These are short 200-250 word pieces about chemistry papers published elsewhere that caught our attention. Last week we covered an article in Science about electron transfer and a total synthesis paper that appeared in JACS.

Our production workflow means that the research highlights we publish on any given Friday were actually chosen on the Tuesday or Wednesday of the preceding week – a full 9 or 10 days before they go live. As a monthly title, that’s as close as we get to ‘news’ on Nature Chemistry.

Nobel day is different though. For one day, the editorial team, the production team and the web team scrabble around to publish a research highlight based on the Nobel Prize in Chemistry just a few hours after the announcement is made. Tight deadlines are something the NatureNews team deal with every day, but it’s different at the research journals. Sure, we have deadlines, lots of ‘em, but none quite so short!

So, next Wednesday, the Nature Chemistry editors based in London (myself, Gavin and Neil) will be eagerly watching the Nobel announcement. The agreement is as follows: if the prize goes in the general area of physical chemistry, then Gavin writes the highlight; if it’s inorganic, then Neil is on the hook; should it be organic, then it’s me. If the prize is not in one of those three general areas, then the lucky writer is… yes, me – as it has been for the last two years. Steve (based in Boston) and Anne (based in Tokyo) are spared because of the time differences…

And of course, in the run up to the Nobel Prize announcements, we have the usual slew of predictions. Now that ChemBark is back, we have an extensive list of odds starting with Zare and Moerner as favourites, and Stoddart and Tour bringing up the rear at 399-1. Thomson Reuters also released their annual predictions, which prompted a colourful response from ChemBark, to which David Pendlebury replied in the comment thread.

Others have weighed in with predictions, including Sam at Everyday Scientist (and take a look at the comment thread too), Wavefunction, and the NNNS chemistry blog. And last but not least, America’s first family have weighed in with their opinions. No, not them, the Simpsons of course! (Thanks to Everyday Scientist for sharing that with everyone).

As for the Nature Chemistry team… well, we’re remaining impartial and not picking anyone! (We’d almost certainly end up being wrong anyway!). If we’ve missed predictions elsewhere, please let us know in the comment thread.

[EDIT: Derek at In the Pipeline has now added his thoughts]

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

EuCheMS – Colloids and culture

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Rather than tenuously cast about for a theme to blog about in this final post from EuCheMS (see yesterday’s post for such tenuousness) I’m just going to write about one talk I saw. I enjoyed it so much I scribbled as many pages of crabbed notes as I did for all of Monday! It was by Piero Baglioni and it was about his work developing materials and methods to restore and preserve works of art.

Apart from this being a very interesting subject in itself, it’s also one that can put chemistry in a very positive light in the wider world – something we can all be grateful for. And Baglioni is one of the best in this area, and also works in Florence, which has more than its fair share of pretty old – and pretty important – works of art as it was the hothouse of the Italian Renaissance.

Before the art, some chemistry. Frescoes – art painted directly onto fresh plaster – can start to flake because of minute changes in the surface of the plaster, caused by the slow reaction of calcium hydroxide with carbon dioxide then sulfuric acid from the atmosphere to form calcium sulfate. Treatment with ammonium carbonate and barium hydroxide nabs the sulfate. Other divalent metal hydroxides (calcium, magnesium and strontium) work too.

The problem is that getting your hydroxide to the plaster is tricky when there’s a pesky work of art in the way. This is where the nano-magic happens! Using nanoparticles of barium hydroxide does the trick, and simply painting on a colloidal suspension seems to reattach the paint and improve the image quality too – they look much ‘fresher’ and smoother.

Art restoration isn’t without its critics (read the Wikipedia page about the restoration of Michaelangelo’s Sistine chapel frescoes, for example), but this approach seems to be less interventionist than other methods. Indeed, another of Baglioni’s projects involves removing the polymers used in the past 20-30 years that were supposed to stabilise frescoes, but which have instead accelerated their destruction. This time it’s microemulsions and micelles that are used.

But how do you remove the emulsions and micelles once they’ve done their job? This is where it gets very clever: magnetic nanoparticles are also incorporated into the gels so they can be whipped off magnetically without the art suffering any physical contact!

I was equally impressed by the quality of art that Baglioni’s methods have restored: works by Gaddi in Florence’s Santa Croce church and Fra Angelico as well as the almost inestimably influential Masaccio frescoes. In the Brancacci chapel, these are credited as pivotal works in the Renaissance and were studied by Raphael and Michaelangelo.

So – even without mentioning the 3 other bloggable talks I went to today – it was a good end to an enjoyable conference. Auf wiedersehen from Nürnberg!

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)