Chemistry – Page 43 – David Bradley

Not fade away

sn14a N st peters No one of whatever religious persuasion who visits the Sistine Chapel in Rome can fail to be impressed by the results of a 20-year restoration project that has brought Michelangelo’s frescoes back to their original level of artistry. Most notable is the brilliance of the sky blue that almost illuminates the Last Judgement on the altar wall of the chapel. But, recent NMR analysis of the ultramarine pigment used to produce this stunning blue suggests its tendency to fade could see the Last Judgement and other works ultimately perish.

Alexej Jerschow of New York University, Eleonora Del Federico of the Pratt Institute, and their colleagues have now discovered why the blue pigment fades. Their findings could provide art conservationists with vital information on how to protect works of art.

You can read the full story in the latest news round up from DB in SpectroscopyNOW.com

Parkinson symptoms

The common perception of Parkinson’s disease is of a disorder that leads to problems with movement, tremors, involuntary spasms, and a shuffling gait. However, functional MRI has now confirmed that the disease can also cause widespread abnormalities in the sense of touch and vision for sufferers. An international team from the US and China presented their findings at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Atlanta on October 17.

Research into Parkinson’s disease has previously focused mainly on the brain’s motor and premotor cortex, sidestepping the somatosensory and the visual cortex because the most prominent symptoms are associated with movement and not the senses. However, neurologist Krish Sathian of Emory University and colleagues discovered through tests of tactile ability, that PD patients also have sensory problems with touch. The researchers recently designed a study using fMRI to investigate this earlier finding and to ascertain whether or not changes in the brain underly these sensory abnormalities.

Read on…

Chemical reactions

The current update of Reactive Reports is now online featuring:

An interview with molecular logician AP de Silva, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, how a biologically compatible gel could revolutionize surgery and save lives in the emergency room, and a dietary response to Alzheimer’s disease that puts red wine, spicy food and a mediterranean salad squarely on the preventative menu.

Check our latest reactions here.

PubChem molecular structure search

Pubchem is fast growing into one of the most useful repositories of small molecule information on the net and best of all it’s free. The service not only gives you the molecular formula and structure but also provides information on the biological activities of millions of small molecules. It is a component of NIH’s Molecular Libraries Roadmap Initiative.

NIH provides its own help resources here, but US chemical information aficionados Gary Wiggins and Dana Roth offer their own help sheets on how to search Pubchem most effectively and find the chemical information you need quickly.

So check out their info and get searching. PubChem allows searching of unique chemical structures using names, synonyms or keywords and provides links to available biological property information. You can also search by PubChem BioAssay using terms from the bioassay description, for example “cancer cell line”. But, most useful for many scientists will be the ability to search using a standard structure format sketched using SMILES, MOL files, or other formats. The main Pubchem landing page is here.

For those who need more help with PubChem, why not join the PubChem discussion group.

Moss side analysis

A bag of moss lying in an irrigation ditch in North East Italy does not conjure up a picturesque image nor the cutting edge of analytical science but nevertheless the special characteristics of the moss Rhynchostegium riparioides make it the ideal environmental monitor according to researchers at the University of Trieste and their colleagues at ARPAV.

Waterways are often intermittently polluted by metals from industrial outflows and other sources. Such waterways are often used in rural parts for agricultural irrigation. The phenomenon is frequent in the Veneto Region of Northeast Italy, according to biologists M. Cesa, F. Fumagalli, and Pier Nimis at Trieste and Alessandro Bizzotto and C. Ferraro of the Vicenza ARPAV Italy.

You can read the complete story in my SpectroscopyNOW news round-up this week.

Resistance is not futile

Platensimycin antibiotic As antibiotics fall to bacterial resistance one by one, it is essential that medicinal chemists keep ahead of the game by finding compounds with new modes of attack. Recently a new antibiotic, platensimycin has been found to act potently through a novel mechanism. Now, US chemists have devised a total synthesis for this unique compound and tracked their progress using mass spectrometry and NMR spectroscopy.

You can read the full story on how Scripps chemist KC Nicolaou and his colleagues have devised a total synthesis of this molecule that could be used as the starting point for manufacturing a new class of antibiotics.

More…

Richard Hammond Explodes (Alkali Metals)

British TV presenter Richard Hammond gained notoriety recently for smashing himself up at almost 300 mph in a dragster for the show Top Gear, but in a parallel life he was presenter of the science experiments show Brainiacs.

This is the classic alkali metals experiment we used to get to watch in chemistry class, but with a difference! These guys take it to the extreme to demonstrate not the fizzing and popping of lithium and sodium, not even just the smashed glass for potassium but the enormous almost Korean-scale explosion possible when caesium is added to water (DO NOT TRY THIS ONE AT HOME!!!).

(Sorry, the video was causing errors – removed)

Sadly it emerged recently that they probably didn’t use caesium in the final experiment at all, but an explosive charge that could nevertheless simulate the devastation a chunk of wet caesium might cause.

For more on the alkali metals and every other element come to that check out the animated periodic table.

Indoor air pollution

Sick building syndrome and multichemical sensitivity may not hit the headlines as often as they used to, but they do continue to represent an important health and safety issue for those who manage work place environments.

Now, researchers in Sweden have carried out a detailed analysis of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), such as aldehydes, amines, and acids, that are found in the air of various buildings. They compared their results for buildings in which people with non-specific building-related symptoms (also called sick building syndrome, SBS) perceive health problems and for buildings where they do not.

More on this in my latest news featured in SpectroscopyNOW.com.

Failing schools chemistry labs

School laboratory Almost Â£2 billion (about $3.7 billion) is needed to refurb school chemistry laboratories and help ensure British science remains viable, according to the Royal Society of Chemistry. If the money is not ring-fenced vital plans to upgrade the labs will fall a quarter of a century behind government targets.

The RSC’s chief executive Richard Pike said today: ‘Our case for faster action to improve school labs, and to assign money to the task, is powerful and incontrovertible. Without something being done to address this slippage Britain could drift to the margins of world science as potential young talent goes unexploited.’ If the government fails to deliver, then this will harm the UK’s competitiveness, the RSC claims in a report on the state of Britain’s school labs, published today:

Pike adds that, ‘There is an acute national need to promote chemistry attractively and inspirationally at school. We have a duty to stimulate the science interest of young people and it is glaringly obvious that sub-standard, dull and bedraggled laboratories will sour the appeal of chemistry and deter them from engaging in the subject successfully.”

With many university chemistry departments hanging by a shoestring and most recently the physics department at Reading University facing closure, it seems timely to remind the government of the importance of science education. Without the much-need upgrades to school labs, our children will not gain the necessary skills so effectively, will not develop a love of science, and will opt for alternative careers. Ultimately, the UK’s science base and so its international competitiveness on many fronts will suffer.

Of course, with the government also intending to abandon assessed coursework for science, maybe we won’t need those labs at all.

Red, red wine

How come it is next to impossible to get a red wine stain out of a white shirt, and yet as soon as inadvertently include a red shirt in with a white load in your washing machine you ended up with all those whites turning pink instead of bluey?

Can’t those dye chemists use whatever it is that makes red wine stain so well to fix the red pigment in that shirt so that it doesn’t come out in the wash?

Just a thought.