Reactions: Felice Grandinetti

Posted on 26 Apr 2013 by Anne Pichon

Felice Grandinetti is in the Department for Innovation in Biological, Agro-food and Forest systems (DIBAF) of the Università della Tuscia, Italy, and works on the computational investigation of the structure, stability, and reactivity of simple inorganic species. The studied systems are in general of fundamental interest, and play also an active role, for example, in environmental and plasma chemistry.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

I was always fascinated by the atomic theory of matter, and by the possibility of interpreting macroscopic observations by the properties of invisible objects. However, when I had to choose my University courses, I initially ruled out chemistry. I believed that it was essentially a practical science, and I am not so able with my hands! However, I learned about theoretical and computational chemistry, and the possibilities offered by these disciplines. I therefore decided to attempt the road of computational chemistry. On the way, however, I realized that the most exciting opportunities come from the combination between theory and experiment.

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

I always had, and I still have, a great passion for classic languages, especially Latin and Greek. Thus, if not a chemist, I would like to be a classic philologist. Besides their intrinsic interest, these languages open the direct fruition of literary masterpieces. In addition, as a Roman citizen, it is nearly impossible to resist the temptation to learn Latin!

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

I am now working on the chemistry of the noble gases, especially by theoretical methods but also in collaboration with experimental teams. I think that the chemistry of these elements is still posing fascinating questions, and I hope in particular to find novel compounds and bonding modes.

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

Among chemists, I would certainly choose Linus Pauling. He was able to combine simple chemical intuition with rigorous theoretical and computational methods, and I believe that he had a greatest impact on the modern view of chemistry. He was also a really special person, and the winning of two Nobel Prizes (Chemistry and Peace) is a clear witness. Among non chemists, I would like to meet Socrates. He did not write anything, but his life and thought have permeated the western culture.

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

I did an experiment a couple of years ago in collaboration with colleagues working in the field of mass spectrometry and ion chemistry. Inspired by theoretical calculations, we were so fortunate to observe a first example of chemical species with a xenon-germanium bond: an exciting experience of predictions and observations working in concert.

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

I would take the “Auto da fé” by Elias Canetti and the 32 Sonate for Piano by L. van Beethoven.

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

I would like to see interviewed chemists who make reactions under less conventional environments such as the gas phase, the cold matrices, and superfluid helium. The results obtained under these conditions are somewhat different from those obtained in solution, and I feel that many “classical” chemists are still unaware of the exciting opportunities which come from these alternative methodologies.

50 things you might not know about Nature Chemistry

Posted on 25 Apr 2013 by Stuart Cantrill

On Monday I realized that our May 2013 issue is our 50th issue. To celebrate, we have compiled 50 (hopefully) interesting tidbits of information about the journal that you might not have been aware of. Apologies for the length of this post, but it seemed like cheating to do fewer than 50…

1. The first formal manuscript submission (i.e., made through our online submission system rather than being e-mailed to us before that went live) arrived on the 25th July 2008. It was sent out to three referees and was then, alas, declined for publication on the 5th September 2008.

2. The first Nature Chemistry research Article was published on February 22nd 2009. The corresponding author was Makoto Fujita and the paper was entitled: Minimal nucleotide duplex formation in water through enclathration in self-assembled hosts. According to Web of Science, as of today it has been cited 62 times.

3. We published 471 research Articles (not including review-type articles) in the first 50 issues of Nature Chemistry. On average, that’s just under 9-and-a-half papers per issue.

4. As of today, according to Web of Science our most cited research Article (in fact, our most-cited piece of content bar none) is this paper: New insights into the structure and reduction of graphite oxide by Pulickel Ajayan and co-workers. It has currently been cited 390 times. It was handled by Anne, who is very smug about this!

5. The first 50 issues piled on top of one another reaches the dizzying height of roughly 25 cm. This seems disappointingly small.

6. We spell ‘sulfur’ with an ‘f’ and here’s an Editorial explaining why.

7. While we are on the subject of spelling, I’m going to point out that we use Oxford English spelling. So, for all of you wondering why we put ‘z’s in lots of words that you don’t think we should, hopefully that answers your question. Quite a few authors have pointed out what they think are spelling mistakes to us. We do occasionally make mistakes, but using ‘ize’ words is not one of them.

8. The f-word made its debut in Nature Chemistry in the August 2012 Blogroll column written by Paul Bracher. It’s all DrRubidium‘s fault… Paul blogged about the experience here. The editorial team discussed if we should go ahead and use the word in all its glory and we decided we would (it wasn’t a unanimous decision). But it’s OK, it is in the Oxford English dictionary after all.

9. Every time Michelle Francl sends me a new Thesis article to edit, I have to look something up in the dictionary. Which is great! The two most recent examples were ‘hermeneutic‘ and ‘sequelae‘…

10. Four of the five original editorial team members are pretty big football fans (the one with the round ball for all you North Americans, you know, the one where a ‘ball’ is kicked with a ‘foot’ for the vast majority of the game… hence the name). Bearing that in mind, I was quite pleased that I was able to get a mention to Manchester United in the March 2011 Editorial.

11. In a similar vein, Gav, who is a massive Sunderland AFC fan, managed to get this phrase into the March 2012 Editorial: How dull would our existence be if everything was black and white — that’s a subtle dig at Sunderland’s big rivals (arch nemeses might be a better description…), Newcastle United, who play in black-and-white stripes (Sunderland play in red-and-white stripes).

12. And speaking of Nature Chemistry Editorials, the one that appeared in the April 2013 issue was all about how the journal uses Twitter. What was a little unusual, however, was that it was written as a sequence of 42 tweets, complete with a Douglas Adams reference at the end. We live-tweeted the editorial the day that it was published in the journal.

13. After the expression ‘rise of the internet’ innocently made its way into the first two Editorials published in the journal (April 2009 and May 2009), it became a bit of a running joke to try and squeeze it into subsequent Editorials. It made into the June 2009, July 2009 and September 2009 Editorials. I think we then mostly forgot about it; but the phrase did make a comeback in the Editorials in the August 2011 and September 2011 issues.

{credit}Taken with Stu's trusty iPhone{/credit}

14. Nature Chemistry editors are, for the most part, fuelled by tea. We even have our own tea cosy, knitted by our former editorial assistant, Hollie.

15. There must be something in the water that we use to make the tea — 4 of the 5 original members of the editorial team got married (not to each other) while working on Nature Chemistry.

16. We’re quite particular about what goes on the cover of the journal; we even wrote an Editorial about cover images, outlining our disdain for arbitrary background images. Here’s a short quote: Shimmering oceans, rippling pools, starry skies, breathtaking sunsets and other equally romantic visions are lovely, but please refrain from putting this type of imagery in the background of your cover suggestion unless you have a really good reason to do so…

17. Hand-drawn chemical structures have appeared on four different Nature Chemistry covers (Oct 2009, July 2010, June 2011); including some structures drawn by yours truly (May 2012).

18. Anne has actually appeared on the cover of the journal. Along with many other female chemists, a picture of Anne was used to form the mosaic of Marie Curie that graced the cover of the September 2011 issue.

19. Pictures of all of the founding editors appeared in the Editorial in the very first issue. This turned out to be quite useful for Gav, who used a hardcopy of issue 1 as photo ID during his visit to Salt Lake City for the 2009 Spring ACS meeting. Yes, this is true.

20. We’re fussy about graphical abstracts too — we covered that in an Editorial as well. We have made it on to tocrofl at least a couple of times (here and here) though…

21. We’re big fans of Twitter and currently the journal has just under 73k followers. All of the editors on the team have their own accounts too: me, Steve, Gav, Anne and Russell.

22. Our first tweet from the journal was made at 10:10 in the morning on the 10th March 2009 — here it is.

23. After a lunch-time conversation in the canteen here at Nature Towers, we started to wonder who the greatest chemist of all time was. We held a completely unscientific poll on Twitter and here are the results (spoiler alert: Pauling won). We then wrote in more detail about the question itself in an Editorial.

24. We have (deliberately) printed some text upside down in the hardcopy of the journal. Bruce Gibb‘s first Thesis article included a quiz and so it just seemed like a good idea to print the answers upside down at the end of the article. We didn’t do this in the online version…

25. We don’t do it as much as Angewandte Chemie, but we do occasionally come up with punny titles, especially for research highlights — many of which are based on song titles. Two of my favourites are Ice ice maybe and Come on silene.

26. Each month we need to come up with four cover lines for the journal, based on the papers published in that issue. When all else fails, we turn to The Phrase Finder, RhymeZone and Google News.

27. We held a science writing competition based on the In Your Element feature in the journal as part of the activities associated with the International Year of Chemistry. The Editorial in the December 2011 issue summarizes the results of the competition.

28. We use a real periodic table to keep track of which elements have been (or are in the process of being) covered for the In Your Element section of the journal. Having said that, we haven’t updated it for a while…

29. Talking of periodic tables, the one we published in only the second issue of Nature Chemistry contained two entries for thorium (Th). Oops. Here’s the erratum.

30. That’s probably not our most embarrassing error, however. In the very first issue, we said that the ratio of hydrogen to oxygen in water (you know, that stuff H₂O) was 1:2. Erm, no. Here’s the erratum.

31. Another embarrassing error is that we have published a stock image of left-handed DNA. No, not Z-DNA, just a normal DNA helix that happens to be left- rather than right-handed. Oops again. It was in this Thesis article ($).

32. We’ve published a picture of Kate Moss in the journal; albeit her likeness cast in gold. Here’s the statue as it appeared in the The Telegraph — we cropped it somewhat more tastefully for this book review ($) by Andrea Sella…

33. Members of the extended editorial team donned Nature Chemistry labcoats and took part in a photoshoot for Dennis Curran’s Thesis article ($) in the December 2012 issue.

34. We’ve probably given away hundreds of those Nature Chemistry-branded labcoats at conferences over the past few years. We have a handful left in the office (good for photoshoots — see point 33!).

35. We’ve even branded a bus with the Nature Chemistry logo!

36. After Neil left us to join the Chemistry World crew, we’ve invited bloggers out there in the wild to write the Blogroll column that appears in the journal each month. So far, we have had: Chemjobber, Paul Bracher, See Arr Oh, BRSM, Ashutosh Jogalekar, Karl D. Collins, Adam Azman, DrFreddy, JessTheChemist, DrRubidium, and Mark Lorch pen the column for us.

37. We’ve been featured on Thomson Reuters’ Science Watch site.

38. We’ve also featured in two April Fools’ blog posts by See Arr Oh at Just like Cooking — here and here.

39. When it turned out that a stock photo of bismuth was going to be far more expensive than simply buying a lump of bismuth and photographing it — we bought a lump of bismuth. And took a photo. And published it in this In Your Element article ($). I still have the bismuth on my desk in the office, but it’s had an accident since we first bought it…

40. So when we needed to illustrate the In Your Element article on selenium, we obviously went out and bought some… brazil nuts. That In Your Element essay can be found here ($).

41. In the name of SCIENCE, the editorial team took a trip to our local liquid nitrogen ice cream parlour. We’ve been back since.

42. While talking about tasty treats, the current Physical Sciences Bake Off Champion (for biscuits — cookies for North Americans) is yours truly — I’m still a synthetic chemist at heart! Find out more about my progress through the competition rounds here.

43. The journal has even published a recipe to make a curry! (From this Thesis article ($) by Bruce Gibb).

44. We celebrated the International Year of Chemistry by publishing a collection of seven Commentary articles about broader issues in chemistry beyond just the science itself. It was meant to be eight Commentaries, but one author dropped out.

45. We’ve published a handful of what we call ‘focus issues’ where we bring together a small number of pieces of content on a similar topic. These include prebiotic chemistry, site-selective reactions, small DNA binders, and protein dynamics.

46. Hannah, who spent a week doing some work experience at Nature Chemistry and other divisions in the company, wrote up her experiences for our blog in (awesome) poem form.

47. When an author has sent us a really good piece for the journal that is just too long for the section it is intended for, we have used our blog to publish the additional material. This includes a fascinating essay by Dan O’Leary on deuterium (and related issues) and a great piece by R. J. Dwayne Miller on molecular motors.

48. Two PHD Comics have appeared in Nature Chemistry, one in this Editorial on posters and the other in this Thesis article ($) by Michelle Francl (which included this comic).

49. So far we have received two impact factors — here are blog posts analysing them.

50. And we’ve even published a cartoon of a chemistry yeti/bigfoot/sasquatch (whatever you want to call it…) in this Thesis article ($) by Michelle Francl on urban legends of chemistry.

Cerium under the lens

Posted on 23 Apr 2013 by Anne Pichon

In this month’s ‘in your element’ article (subscription required), Eric Schelter from the University of Pennsylvania draws our attention to cerium, an element that serves a variety of commercial and industrial applications, yet presents chemists with some rather peculiar challenges.

Although it is one of the rare-earth elements, cerium is fairly abundant in the Earth’s crust, and widely used for various purposes. The oxide ceria (CeO₂), for example, is a common abrasive for the polishing of surfaces ranging from optical lenses to electronic displays. The reason it is particularly efficient is that, in addition to a mechanical polishing action, it attacks the basic sites of surfaces.

Most of cerium’s applications rely on its interconversion between the +3 and +4 oxidation states. I’ll let you read in the article how “hydrocarbon fuels encounter element 58 at both the beginning and the end of their useful life”, and which cerium compound represents a “drastic ‘nuclear option’ for oxidation reactions” in synthetic chemistry.

There is much to explore regarding the reactivity of cerium, and even in terms of the electronic structure of some of its compounds — this is an aspect that I find particularly intriguing. Take cerocene, a seemingly straightforward complex that consists of a cerium centre sandwiched between two C₈H₈ ligands to form an eclipsed sandwich complex. Experimental characterization and computational calculations point to a multiconfigurational ground state, for which it’s proving rather difficult to determine unambiguously the Ce(III) and Ce(IV) contributions. As Schelter puts it, “this deceptively simple compound represents a stimulating case where the very human concept of a formal oxidation state fails to capture the essential essence of a molecule.”

Anne Pichon (Senior Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Common sense science

Posted on 05 Apr 2013 by Stuart Cantrill

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Liesbeth Venema, a Senior Editor at Nature.

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As a recent comment in Nature pointed out (Lab life: Scientists are snobs), it’s all too easy to get carried away at big multi-session conferences and gravitate towards presentations given by high-flying scientists and those from top institutes. Encountering some down-to-earth research can be a healthy antidote.

At the recent annual American Physical Society meeting in Baltimore, a young researcher approached the Nature stand and told me about a project in his lab: the development of a wireless sensor to detect traces of methanol in liquids. I wasn’t immediately sure why this would be so important, but then he told me the motivation for the work.

As it turned out, the researcher came from the University de los Andes, in Bogotá, Colombia. In Colombia (and many other countries) organized crime gangs run an illicit alcoholic drinks industry and unscrupulously mix their wares with methanol to make them cheaper. And the problem with methanol is that it is extremely toxic and can lead to blindness (and even death) depending on how much is ingested.

Around 300,000 bottles of adulterated alcoholic beverages were confiscated by authorities in Colombia in 2011. Ideally of course, the criminal networks need to be closed down, but in the meantime, affordable sensors that consumers can use to test alcoholic drinks would be a practical, life-saving solution to the immediate problem.

The Colombian group has been working on a wireless battery-free sensor which can be dipped in a liquid and pick up the presence of unwanted compounds. It is small and simple, but elegantly designed, consisting of a resonating electronic circuit that detects variations in its environment as changes in its resonance frequency. The group previously demonstrated such a sensor to detect hazardous compounds in water (Diego A. Sanz et al. Sensors and Actuators B: Chemical Volume 178, 1 March 2013, Pages 26–33).

Their current prototype methanol sensor can detect concentrations as small as 0.2% in 40% alcoholic beverages, which is even better than the methanol limit (0.4%) set by health agencies. At the moment, the read-out equipment is too expensive for general use (the sensor itself costs only a few dollars), but the researchers are improving the sensor’s sensitivity so that a cheaper analyser could do the job.

There is a fast growing body of work on point-of-care sensors and imagers, often based on mobile phones, that can be deployed in under-developed countries. Such efforts are not about creating ultra-high precision, highly-engineered sensors, but making ones that are as simple as possible and yet have sufficient sensitivity for a targeted health application. Affordable, low-maintenance systems for monitoring the quality of water, food and other goods could play an essential role in protecting the health of millions of people.

It may not seem the most glamorous type of research work, but perhaps it should.

The Sceptical Chymist

a blog from Nature Chemistry

Monthly Archives: April 2013

Reactions: Felice Grandinetti

50 things you might not know about Nature Chemistry

Blogroll: Chemistry in crowds

Cerium under the lens

Common sense science