Monthly Archives: March 2013

Reactions: Catherine Renouf

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Catherine Renouf is a PhD student in the Department of Chemistry at The University of St Andrews, and studies the separation of olefin mixtures using metal–organic frameworks using adsorption-based and structural techniques — she is also one of the winners of our In Your Element writing competition, with her essay on indium.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

At school I was always good at science, and I found all of science interesting and rewarding. However, I found chemistry both more challenging and more fascinating than the other sciences, probably due to one particular chemistry teacher. He was the only teacher in my school with a PhD, and he was fantastic at communicating his excitement for the subject. He made us do a lot of experiments during chemistry classes, and that really held my interest.

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

I love baking, which is really just chemistry in a different disguise, so maybe I would have been a professional baker. However, I am very passionate about communication, and particularly about the communication of science, so I would also have been very happy as a writer.

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

I’m nearing the end of my PhD now, so I’m mainly working on my thesis! A large part of my research was developing an environmental gas cell to use in single crystal X-ray crystallography at the ALS in Berkeley. Over the past three years it has improved to a stage where we can see gases inside our MOFs which has been a significant and exciting development. Hopefully, with more time and development, the gas cell will become a standard piece of equipment available on end stations at synchrotrons throughout the world.

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

I think it would have to be W. L. Bragg, the youngest Nobel laureate and one of the discoverers of Bragg’s law. He was the director of the laboratories where Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA using X-ray diffraction, so he certainly knew how important his discovery had been, and hearing about the early years of his field (and hearing his views about recent developments, such as quasicrystals) would be fascinating.

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

A couple of weeks ago I recorded an adsorption and desorption isotherm of propylene on a metal-organic framework using home-built gravimetric adsorption apparatus. It was nothing particularly exciting by that point – just a repeated measurement for inclusion in my thesis appendices.

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

I would take Ben Goldacre’s newest book, Bad Pharma. I love reading popular science books, but I haven’t had the time while finishing up my PhD. Music-wise, I would take something relaxing and inspiring, possibly some Elgar.

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

Someone who does something a little different with their chemistry – perhaps a beamline scientist at a national facility, a teaching fellow at a university or a writer for a science magazine.

Blogroll: Fighting fear

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Editor’s note: As we continue to invite bloggers out there in the wild to compose our monthly Blogroll column, DrRubidium penned the April 2013 column.

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Changing the tune on chemistry’s bad rap

Chemophobia has led manufacturers and proprietors to advertise ‘chemical-free’ goods and services; it pops up in literature by activist groups like Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families — and has even infected popular media outlets. The rise in the fear of chemicals and chemistry has many chemists, as well as scientists in all fields, asking what can be done to eradicate chemophobia.

One way to counter chemophobia is for scientists and science writers to tackle it head-on. Michelle Francl, a professor of chemistry who blogs at The Culture of Chemistry, responded to a February New York Times Magazine article ‘The Boy With a Thorn in His Joints’ about parents treating their child’s arthritis with ‘natural’ alternatives instead of the recommended methotrexate. Writing in Slate, Francl pointed out that the parents’ ‘natural’ alternatives were also chemicals — ones that have their own safety concerns. Stressing that everything is a chemical and all chemicals have risks are tips that Francl gives for fighting a ‘chemophobia pandemic’.

ChemBark offers another way to fight chemophobia — by chemists doing outreach. “I think it is important that every chemist spends some time engaging the general public for the purposes of education and promoting the benefits of our field” wrote ChemBark in his post ‘Combatting Chemophobia‘. Writing as if he’s talking to an outreach naysayer, ChemBark answers typical questions like “What’s in it for me?” and charges like “I can’t put that on my CV!”

Why fight chemophobia? For one thing, chemistry is “…the amazing and beautiful science of stuff…” as Hank Green puts it in his video on the nucleus for Crash Course — a YouTube channel where you can learn about topics from literature to ecology to chemistry.

Written by DrRubidium, who blogs at https://scientopia.org/blogs/thirtyseven/ and https://www.thejayfk.com/

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[As mentioned in this post, we’re posting the monthly blogroll column here on the Sceptical Chymist. This is the April 2013 article]

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How to write an editorial (in tweets)

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Today we published an Editorial describing how Nature Chemistry (@NatureChemistry) has used Twitter over the past 4 years. The topic of the Editorial was something I had been mulling over for a while, but the format is something that wasn’t planned until I sat down to write it. An Editorial about Twitter? Well, why not write it in a series of tweets (some team members even joked about doing it this way before I sat down to write the thing)? As it turns out, I couldn’t resist the challenge…

And what were the challenges exactly? Well, each tweet (including any mentions or links) obviously had to be 140 characters or fewer. That was a rule that couldn’t be broken. Other considerations were a little more subtle: I wanted each tweet to more-or-less stand alone and make sense in its own right. Typically an Editorial has a main theme that builds and builds as you read it, and the writer can usually depend on the reader remembering what they read in the previous sentence or paragraph to put the current point in context. That wasn’t the case here, yet I did want the Editorial to flow — well, as much as 42 individual statements can…

Another concern was repetition; I didn’t want each tweet to start with ‘We use Twitter to…’ — something that would have been so easy to do (but would have been so boring to read). And while the Editorial does use the words ‘Twitter’ and ‘tweet’ quite a bit, that was pretty much unavoidable. The final challenge, and it might seem ridiculous considering the topic, was for the Editorial to fill one printed page in the journal. Yep, a printed page. Filled. With tweets. Before writing this particular Editorial, I looked at previous examples in the journal and came up with a rough estimate of the number of tweets that it would take to fill a page. 40-45 looked like the magic number, and it would be better to write more and cut later, rather than shoehorn new ones in at a later stage. Once it became clear that the final figure might be 42, there was an opportunity (well, compulsion) to finish with a reference to Douglas Adams.

It’s worth mentioning the time scale on which Editorials are written for the journal. Today — the day the Editorial was published — is March 20th. Content for our April issue had to be finalized for ‘press day’ — the day the final PDFs get made up and sent off to the printers; that was March 6th. The date by which the Editorial had to be given to the production team for copy-editing and layout was March 1st. Working back from that, I wanted to make sure that my team had plenty of time to tell me just what a bad idea this was and that I should just write a normal editorial and so, with that in mind, the first draft was written on the weekend of 16/17th February (yep, a weekend, for those paying attention). So, that’s more than one month between putting pen to paper (fingers to keyboard) and the date of publication. That explains some of the date ranges given in the Editorial and why some of the numbers that are quoted will have changed if you look them up now.

photo-1The version that was handed over to our production team consisted of a title, standfirst, Wordle, and 42 tweets in the main body of the article. It turned out to be 22 lines too long. Ouch. Look at the picture of the proof to see what needed to be done to cut it down to size. 4-line tweets were cut to 3 and a couple of tweets were removed completely. Click through to the larger version of the image to see exactly what changes were made. And it was on the second page so you can’t see it, but #overlyhonestmethods had to be cut from the hashtag tweet (it didn’t play nice with line breaks).

The ’42’ ending still works; one tweet for the title, one for the standfirst and 40 for the main text (you could argue that the original version was actually 44 tweets and the published one is genuinely 42 tweets in total). We still had problems with orphans and widows in the pdf version, so we shifted some of the tweets around. If you compare the proof to the published version (and you care that much) you can figure out what was moved where. Yes, it’s somewhat bizarre that an Editorial about how we use a web 2.0 tool is dictated — to some extent — by old-fashioned typesetting issues, but there you go.

Once the Editorial was finalized and it was too late to make changes, other examples of how we use Twitter obviously sprang to mind. It’s not just the one book review that came about because of interactions on Twitter. Declan Fleming (@declanfleming) reviewed Itch for us (review here; subscription required) after I contacted him about it through Twitter and after getting to know Jamie Gallagher (@JamieBGall) on Twitter, we asked him to review the 2012 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for us — (review here; subscription required).

The intention from the beginning was to tweet the whole thing, as we did today — and that’s the first (and probably the last) time we’ll do something like this. We hope you enjoyed it, or at least found it interesting!

Stuart (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Enigmatic astatine

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When we think of the halogens, F, Cl, Br and I are generally those that spring to mind. Yet there is, of course, another one — astatine. In contrast to the first four, ubiquitous on earth and which serve in numerous reactions, astatine is rare and has remained a bit of a mystery. It is the topic of this month’s ‘in your element’ article (subscription required), written by Scott Wilbur from the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Washington.

As its name reflects — astatos is the Greek word for unstable — it is radioactive. All of the known isotopes of astatine are radioactive, the longest-lived ones (210At and 211At) with half-lives of only 8.1 and 7.2 h, respectively. This does not facilitate chemical and physical characterization, in particular making it impossible to weigh and even observe element 85 in the conventional sense. Fortunately, these two isotopes can be produced by irradiation of bismuth targets — only in very small amounts, but sufficient for some research nonetheless.

The field in which astatine has attracted the most attention is medicine — but only the 211 isotope; its 210 counterpart is definitely unsuitable as it decays into polonium-210, a species that made the news a few years ago through the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. Actually, 211At is one of the rare α-emitters to be investigated for medical applications; they usually wreak havoc in internal organs. I’ll let you go to the article to read about its potential medical uses — as well as the challenges in investigating it, including how difficult it is to even determine whether or not it is released from a carrier molecule.

In some other ways, astatine behaves very much like other halogens and undergoes electrophilic and nucleophilic reactions. I wouldn’t recommend trading halogens for astatine in any of your up-coming reactions just yet; reproducibility can be an issue (this is not overly surprising considering you may only have about 10-13 to a maximum of 10-8 grams of astatine in any given sample and this may be a smaller amount than any trace impurities!). In any case, we don’t know nearly enough about astatine’s physical and chemical properties — but if you like working with minute amounts of decaying species, give it some thought!

Anne Pichon (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)