Chemistry – Page 32 – David Bradley

Spiked innovations

Some time ago, the editors at Sp!ked-Online asked me to suggest what I thought was the greatest innovation of all time. I tried to be a bit esoteric and opted for the inorganic chemistry of ammonia and sulfuric acid, certainly not the most exciting sounding of entries in the sp!ked innovation survey, but I hope the chemists among their readership would appreciate it among all the more electrical technological suggestions and the tools of molecular biology.

It seems I was among some eminent participants, “key thinkers in science, technology and medicine” allegedly with some half a dozen Nobel laureates in their number. The survey aimed to identify the greatest innovations and a live discussion is scheduled to take place in London on June 6.

Surveying the responses, Mick Hume, sp!ked’s editor-at-large, says the survey “Provides some illuminating insight both into the important developments of the recent and more distant past, and into the way those involved at the cutting edge see the issue of innovation today.” My colleague Philip Ball, a fellow freelance science writer with a chemical bent, also stuck up for chemistry in his submission opting for innovations in analytical chemistry, including NMR spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography.

Among the other innovations suggested were The Internet, the alphabet, the discovery of nuclear fusion, X-rays, the brick, rockets, the eraser. I surely must posit that without sulfuric acid and ammonia not one of those innovations would ever have reached its full potential. Maybe I should also add an upside down exclamation mark, just to emphasize my point!

Among the other contributors to the event are Anjana Ahuja, science columnist, The Times, Ken Arnold Head of Public Programmes, Wellcome Trust, Peter Cochrane co-founder of ConceptLabs, and former chief technologist at BT, Marcus Du Sautoy professor of mathematics, Wadham College, Oxford, Sir Tim Hunt (FRS) principal scientist, Cancer Research UK, and David Roblin VP, Clinical R&D, Pfizer Global Research & Development.

Digg for Chemists

Berkeley chemist Mitch Garcia, who runs ChemicalForums.com has come up with a “novel” way to evaluate the chemical literature that will complement current ways of evaluating a particular paper. At the moment, the only way to determine whether a particular experiment is valid are to trust the quality of the peer review process for the particular journal in question, attempt to repeat the experiment yourself, check out how many other chemists are citing the paper, or somehow try to relate the quality of the paper to the author’s h-index, an altogether more ephemeral and perhaps elitist quality.

Garcia has now launched ChemRank, which will augment this unwieldy process by allowing individuals to post a reference and then see others vote on whether or not the paper in question is any good or not. Those papers with the most votes will rise to the top, while the less worthy will essentially sink. The system will rely on building a big enough userbase and somehow ensuring that chemists don’t simply spam their own papers or vote arbitrarily for their friends and Profs. How effective Garcia’s system will be remains to be seen as it has only just launched. The number of papers currently being voted on is small and the number of votes is low, so take a look and if you feel like digging chemistry, make your vote count.

Combined effort makes for glowing report

One of the most powerful techniques available to analytical scientists is Raman spectroscopy. Unfortunately, it is not easy to distinguish the low-intensity signals it produces when studying fluorescent species in cells because they are swamped by the much brighter glow from various cell components. Now, Dutch researchers have overcome this incompatibility to hybridize Raman with fluorescence microscopy by exploiting the optical properties of semiconductor fluorescent quantum dots (QDs). They have demonstrated hybrid Raman fluorescence spectral imaging in studies of single cells.

Biophysical engineers Henk-Jan van Manen and Cees Otto of the University of Twente, The Netherlands, have used fluorescent nanoparticles to broaden the scope of single-cell microscopy by combining it with intracellular chemical analysis based on Raman. The researchers explain that quantum dots allows weak Raman signals from DNA to shine through the ubiquitous glow from proteins and lipids.

You can read the full story in my SpectroscopyNOW column this week.

Toxic hairdos, titanic smog, and paradoxical polymers

In my fortnightly Alchemist column over on ChemWeb, I take a fast and furious look at a few of the chemical happenings in the news. This week, geochemical biomarkers are rewarded for pioneering our historical understanding of climate change, while a seemingly paradoxical polymer emerges from mathematics to help compute future optical chips.

Also on the roster a Titanic effort has been undertaken to reveal the chemical nature of the smog that shrouds one of Saturn’s moons (Titan, in case you couldn’t guess) and we reveal the stickiest of sticky materials that can bond materials as disparate as copper and silica tighter than ever before.

At least one dyed in the wool media health scare story has been cut short this month with the discovery that chemical relaxers, used by African-American women to straighten their hair, do not cause breast cancer, after all.

And, finally, new forensic information can now be dabbed from fingerprints thanks to research carried out in the UK. Antibody assays carried out on fingerprints can now be used to tell if an unidentified suspect smokes, whether they use drugs, or even if they have an illness.

Chemrefer Chemspider Coupled

A mash up between Chemrefer, the search engine for open access chemistry papers, and molecular structure search engine Chemspider launched today. I have to confess to playing no small part in facilitating this collaboration having introduced the Chemspider team, virtually speaking, to the owner of Chemrefer, Will Griffiths, who was a Reactive Profilee in June 2006. You can access the chemical mash up here. Search for any term of interest and the new hybrid tool will return all the pertinent results that are available for instant free access from the journal publishers. There are something like 50000 papers accessible this way via a search of more than 14.5million+ chemical entities.

Chemists Pull Rank

The RSC recently published a league table showing the top-ranking, living chemists. The league is based on the so-called h-index. This parameter was devised by Jorge Hirsch in 2005 in order to measure the impact of an individual chemist’s research. Put simply, the h-index is equal to the highest number of papers that chemist has published which have gained at least that number of citations from other authors. According to the Chemistry World Blog today, thirty more chemists have been added to the league. Hirsch argued that the h-index avoids bias by combining total published papers with a citation parameter it does not reward the prolific but mediocre. The original league was created by Henry Schaefer and colleagues manually by trawling ISI citation data, but I am sure an intrepid chemical web student could create a suitable script to do the job automatically.

Windows cause pollution

Windows Cause
Pollution This is not another terrible advertisement for an alternative computer operating system to the eponymous installation mentioned in the title, but an environmental analysis that reveals how dirty windows are a major contributor to urban pollution.

A Scent for
Explosives A new type of biosensor based on yeast, jellyfish
proteins, and a rat’s sense of smell could sniff out explosives, landmines, and agents, such as sarin gas, according to researchers at Temple University.

The Long and the
Short of It A new composite material that acts as a catalyst to
speed up chemical reactions has been developed to create arrays of the
world’s longest carbon nanotubes.

Meeting of Molecular Movie Stars A clandestine meeting between molecules, a chemical handshake, and an exchange of energy have all been recorded on camera by scientists in the UK and Germany.

Read the full stories in Reactive Reports, the chemistry webzine from David Bradley Science Writer and ACD/Labs. Next month, we have a profile of Berkeley nuclear chemist and Sciencebase regular commentator Mitch Garcia.

Nanotechnology Used to Enter Plant Cells

US scientists are using nanotechnology to penetrate plant cell walls and deliver a gene and a chemical triggers with great precision. The work could lead to a powerful new tool for targeted delivery into plant cells.

The research is highlighted in the May issue of Nature Nanotechnology. Kan Wang of Iowa State University and his colleagues point out that introducing a gene into a plant cell is possible but chemical activation usuall involves an imprecise and separate process that may be toxic to the plant.

“With the mesoporous nanoparticles, we can deliver two biogenic species at the same time,” Wang said. “We can bring in a gene and induce it in a controlled manner at the same time and at the same location. That’s never been done before.”

The controlled release will improve the ability to study gene function in plants. And in the future, scientists could use the new technology to deliver imaging agents or chemicals inside cell walls. This would provide plant biologists with a window into intracellular events.

Lin’s porous, silica nanosphere system has arrays of independent porous channels, which form a honeycomb-like structure that can be filled with chemicals. “One gram of this kind of material can have a total surface area of a football field, making it possible to carry a large payload,” Trewyn said.

Organic Lectures Reach Drexel Island

Jean-Claude Bradley at Drexel University has taken his second life persona to his professional bosom and is now providing organic chemistry students not only with obelisks on the dragon-shaped island of Drexel (Drexopia, perhaps?), but they can now see organic chemistry lectures there too. It is an incredibly innovative use of SL, but I wonder whether students are going to feel like they are being monitored not only in the real world of university lecture rooms and study areas, but in the escapist virtual spaces of SL too. Scary thought.

Heavy metal plants in the spectral news

Over on SpectroscopNOW.com David Bradley reports on the usual eclectic mix of science news with a hint of the spectral. This week:

Heavy metal plants – Herbal medicine is a global phenomenon, a multibillion dollar industry, and its raw materials phytochemicals are widely used as the precursors for regulated pharmaceutical products. One problematic area on both sides is in product purity, with contamination by toxic heavy metals one of the most common complaints. Now, researchers in Argentina have developed a way to “digest” herbal medicines to improve the detection limits of heavy metal contaminants, such as lead and cadmium, for quality control of these products.

Tubeless and hyphenated – Slightly more esoteric, but equally important for analytical science is the development of a new software algorithm for getting the most out nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments. According the Gary Martin of Schering-Plough, the software developed with ACD/Labs collaboration, means that even if a sample of product has been lost, the spectroscopist can retrieve latent information from the initial NMR runs without having to find a new sample and spend a week record experimental spectra. Martin confesses that this new approach to sophisticated NMR is not without its critics. He gave an ENC invited lecture on the subject of this new technique, known as Unsymmetrical Indirect Covariance, and told me that his talk raised a few eyebrows, to say the least.

Super plat cats – A new form of platinum, 24-facet nanocrystals, have been produced by an international collaboration. The novel tetrahexahedral particles are four times as effective a catalyst as the industrially important commercial platinum available for oxidising formic acid and ethanol. The work could lead to a more efficient process of catalytic oxidation for the production of hydrogen for fuel cells. “If we are going to have a hydrogen economy, we will need better catalysts,” says Zhong Lin Wang of the Georgia Institute of Technology, “This new shape for platinum catalyst nanoparticles greatly improves their activity.” Discussion continues elsewhere on Sciencebase regarding the putative folly of a hydrogen economy. Hopefully, if such an approach to alternative energy does not come to pass, Wang will find numerous other industrial applications for these super plat cats.

Consolidated database – US researchers have exploited a new technique to identify almost all the chemical changes nature makes by adding phosphate groups to human proteins. They have now hooked up this data to the publicly accessible PhosphoMotif Finder system in an effort to stimulate further biomedical research into the vital process of phosphorylation.