Category: Chemistry

As long-time readers will know, Sciencebase has its roots in the first chemistry webzine, Elemental Discoveries, started by David Bradley Science Writer back in December 1995. The site continues to provide chemistry news from around the world.

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Latest science snippets

  • New cancer treatment shows promise – An holistic and alternative approach to cancer treatment that isn't "alternative medicine"
  • Pillbox – prototype pill identification system – Pillbox enables rapid identification of unknown solid-dosage medications (tablets/capsules) based on physical characteristics and high-resolution images.
  • The Alchemist Newsletter: November 12, 2010 — Welcome to ChemWeb – In this week's issue a new definition of the hydrogen bond could lead to major textbook revisions and open up new chemical vistas. We learn that a turbo transfer can be used to synthesize useful nucleosides and organic vegetables are no higher in healthy nutrients than conventional crops. The world of materials could make "Star Wars" type holographic movies a reality and a weed might be the biofuel industry's saving grace in the food versus fuel debate. Finally, accolades for DOE biochemist Richard Smith.

Canned heavy metal and more

My latest science news updates on SpectroscopyNOW – covering heavy metal sardines, pain relief and sleep problems, oral insulin and a new male infertility test that could explain the issue problem.

  • Canned heavy metal – Samples of tinned sardines, originating from six countries have been analyzed for total arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury content using spectroscopy. The analysis provides a useful baseline for a foodstuff – small pelagic fish – that could become increasingly important in a possible sustainable future and shows that arsenic rather than mercury could be the main concern in eating such small fish rather than predators.
  • The near and FAAH of drug discovery – A new mathematical approach to drug discovery that can test a huge number of molecular structures using a computer only could uncover inhibitors for an important enzyme involved in sleep, pain and body movement.
  • Oral insulin microspheres – A simple, inexpensive, and gentle process to make tiny spheres of therapeutic proteins, such as insulin, might allow these agents to be delivered by mouth without the need to encapsulate them in a nanotech coating or other Trojan horse type system to get them past the hazards of the gastrointestinal tract and into the bloodstream.
  • Fertility testing issues circumvented by spectroscopic technique – Traditional clinical tests on seminal fluid for infertility and sub-fertility prediction do not provide many insights into the underlying medical problem. But, metabolic spectroscopic tests could offer a less time-consuming and less labour-intensive alternative to address this shortcoming and provide a non-invasive and more useful test for infertility that might hint at biological issues.

Airbus A380 engine failure

Airbus A380 engine failure

  • A380 engine failure – Qantas flight 32 en route to Sydney, Australia, forced to make an emergency landing after an engine failure. Qantas has grounded all of its Airbus A380 “superjumobo” fleet as a result. There are 20 other A380s around the globe that have the same Rolls Royce engines as Qantas flight 32.
  • Rosalind Franklin and DNA: How wronged was she? – Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology in 1962 for this work, four years after Franklin’s death of ovarian cancer, possibly induced by her work with x-rays. But, shouldn’t Franklin’s work be given more credit than it has ever received. The debate goes on. To my mind, Wilkins let the crystallograph into W-C’s hands because they all suspected Pauling was on to the structure of DNA and Franklin was being too slow and cautious in making her pronouncements on it. As it turned out Pauling hadn’t come up with the correct structure anyway.

Shrinking synchrotrons, stink bugs, odour vie

  • Shrinking synchrotrons – Details of a tabletop synchrotron device has been revealed by an international team of scientists in the journal Nature Physics. The new device could revolutionise X-ray work and preclude the need for large-scale synchrotrons in many structural studies without compromising resolution or atomic detail.
  • Kicking up a stink bug – Japanese researchers have used UV-Vis and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to help them develop a potential repellent for the invidious stink bug, an invasive pest species that has been spreading rapidly through the USA, invading homes and damaging crops.
  • Odour vie – Electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy has allowed researchers to study how nanoparticles can eliminate offensive household odours by removing the odour molecules at source rather than simply masking the bad smells.

Latest science snippets

  • Shampoo in your eyes – Botanical extracts added to shampoos almost never do anything at all and are usually  there purely and simply to make the product look more natural.   They are used at very low levels indeed. Expensive shampoo is a waste of money as is the cheap stuff you buy by the gallon. Supermarket own brands are fine, apparently.
  • Free scientific calculator – Red Crab is a free and portable calculator for Windows that is perfectly suitable for complex algebraic equations like fractions, square roots, exponents and a lot more. The best option to take a look at the calculator’s capabilities is to load a few of the demo projects that ship with the download.
  • First all-digital science textbook will be free – Within two and a half years, the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation hopes to complete a 59-chapter digital textbook about biology called Life on Earth. As each chapter is finished, the foundation plans to put it into the hands of anyone who wants it, for free.

Olive oil, breast cancer, gigapixel scans

  • Olive oil biophenols – Raman reveals all – The first report of Raman spectroscopy being used to look at chemical structures in olive oil has been published. The study establishes Raman as a rapid, non-destructive and reliable analytical technique for identifying bioactive components, such as biophenols in dietary extracts and surpasses other analytical methods.
  • One nanoparticle for targeting, tracking and treating breast cancer – Nanoparticles coupled to a fluorescent dye can be used to target tumour-specific molecules in breast cancer providing a way to track the particles by NIR spectroscopy, to enhance magnetic resonance imaging and to deliver an anticancer payload only to diseased cells.
  • Zoom and enhance for medical imaging – Computer scientists at the University of Utah have developed software that can generate rapid previews of super-high resolution images for medical, astronomical, and other applications. Images containing billions to hundreds of billions of pixels drain computer resources rapidly but a new technique for analysing the data could allow gigapixel MRI scans and other images to be previewed and manipulated much more easily and quickly than is currently possible.

Boiling sun, alchemist, freewill

  • The boiling Sun – In case you woke up today feeling important…there's a rather humbling picture that shows the scale of a plume of gas erupting from the surface of the Sun that would literally engulf the whole planet. More to the point, you could fit the Earth into the sun a million times over…and the sun isn't even a particularly big star and it's just one of billions in our galaxy and there are billions of galaxies in the "known" universe. The universe itself may simply be a tiny bubble in a even more unimaginable froth of universes…still pretty picture isn't it?
  • Alchemist for 27th October on ChemWeb.com – In this week's issue theoretical work opens up entirely new chemical vistas hinting at the chemistry of elements beyond atomic number 118 up to 172. In environmental chemistry, a new protocol for assessing a common ingredient of personal-care products could allow the risks associated with their use to be determined more accurately than before. An inexpensive support for platinum could make electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen economically viable, while waste products from wood processing offer an alternative feedstock for liquid fuels. In the medicinal world, details of a natural joint lubricant are revealed that could eventually improve prevention and treatment of joint disease. Finally, two major diseases of the developing world revolve around a single enzyme and new funding could help in the fight against these diseases.
  • Free Will is NOT An Illusion | Brain Blogger – If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice. Nice expose of misinterpretation of freeewill tests since 1980s could mean we really do have a choice.
  • Toxic colour test – A new lab-on-a-chip sensor array that is little bigger than a business card can detect toxic industrial chemicals at low cost and at low concentrations.

Science news with a spectral twist

My latest science updates on SpectroscopyNOW.com:

  • Soft solar cell – US researchers have demonstrated that water-gel-based solar devices can act like "artificial leaves" heralding the possibility of soft matter solar energy conversion devices.
  • X-Ray resistance – An X-ray structure determined by US researchers reveals details of the only remaining class of multidrug resistance transporters that remained to be described. The work has implications for antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, as well as for developing hardy strains of agricultural crops.
  • Ionic liquids are a gas – A gas-phase Raman spectroscopic study of the "green" solvents known as room temperature ionic liquids has been used to offer a clearer understanding of the nature of their underlying chemistry. The study reveals that in the gas phase each ion of the pair exists as a distinct molecule.
  • NMR goes up to 11 (and beyond) – A technique to amplify nuclear magnetic resonance signals 50-fold or more can be applied to the surfaces of solid-state samples, according to research published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
  • Stable dyes – New dyes that have sharp absorptions and fluorescence emission bands in the red or near infrared as well high molar absorption coefficients and high fluorescence quantum yields could be used widely optical engineering, analytical chemistry, biological imaging and sensors, as well as in materials science.
  • Noble medical thermometer – "Thermometry based on hyperpolarized xenon sensors improves the accuracy of currently available MRI thermometry methods," the researchers conclude, "potentially it could give rise to biomedical applications of biosensors functionalized for binding to specific target molecules."
  • It’s like, okay to say like – Teenage vernacular has always confused adults, particularly when the terminology seems to fly in the face of conventional grammar. Of course, any cunning linguist will tell you that language evolves and that yesterday's perfect grammar rule is often tomorrow's quaintly archaic phrasing. Moreover, the errant use of the word "like", which often like litters youthful conversation is merely the current filler word, the um and ah if you will of street and schoolyard vernacular. It's merely a part of yoof culture, innit? Get over it, Emma, why don't ya?
  • Is chemistry worth it? – One in every five pounds in the UK economy is dependent on developments in chemistry research (£250billion, in other words), according to a new report published today. Science is Vital. It really is. Cut the cuts.
  • Enjoy yourself…it’s later than you think! – There is a 50 per cent chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years, according to a new model of the universe.

Spectral science and more

More science news snippets from Sciencebase:

  • CRISPR X-rays – New on my SpectroscopyNOW column – "It would be exciting if a CRISPR-like system could be transferred into mammalian cells," Doudna told us, "where it might be engineered to silence the expression of deleterious host cell genes, or genes encoded by viral or bacterial pathogens. If this were possible, it could avoid complications of using the RNA interference (RNAi) pathway intrinsic to mammalian cells, which is currently the focus of many biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies."
  • Calculating chemists – New on my SpectroscopyNOW column – A new approach to the calculation of NMR spectra could help organic chemists identify stereoisomers of small, but complex molecules, much more quickly according to theoretical chemists at Cambridge University.
  • A comet’s tale – New on my SpectroscopyNOW column – Ab initio molecular dynamics simulations and detailed analysis hint at how conditions on the early earth might have been ripe for a cometary impact to generate small organic molecules. The study suggests that the formation of molecules akin to the simple amino acid glycine may have been viable. Follow-up spectroscopic studies may demonstrate the validity of the hypothesis.
  • Just launched: Wellcome Digital Library – The Wellcome Library announced an ambitious plan to develop a world-class digital resource for the History of Medicine. The core of this resource will be digitised content from the Library's own holdings, although funding will also be made available to others to digitise complementary collections for inclusion in the digital library.
  • Scientia Pro Publica blog carnival – The 39th edition of Scientia Pro Publica! This blog carnival showcases the finest science, medical and environment writing published in the blogosphere
  • Last nail in the coffin for mercury-autism hypothesis? – There is no link.