Chemistry – Page 57 – David Bradley

The Inner Secrets of Rocks and Fossils

Researchers at UCLA have produced the first 3D images of fossils embedded in rocks aged between 650 and 850 million years old. New microscopy and spectroscopy techniques allowed them to sneak an interior peek inside ancient rocks without having to crack them open. The research allows them to spot signs of ancient microscopic life, such as fossil cell walls and could be useful in studying extraterrestrial rocks in the search for alien life.

Dig inside the full story in David Bradley’s news page on spectroscopynow.com

The Alchemist Born Again

For those of you who didn’t know, ChemWeb’s “The Alchemist” was given a new lease of life by chemical searching company Chemindustry.com some time ago now. In fact, I’ve just compiled issue 38 of the “new” chemistry news round-up. It’s live today and covers a diverse range of chemical matter including an expose on how soil-eating microbes can be engineered to produce biodegradable plastics, more revelations on benzene in soft drinks, and the scandal surrounding the US’s refusal to grant eminent Indian chemist Goverdhan Mehta an entry visa

Read on…

Sporty Nanotubes

Integrating stiff carbon nanotubes into more traditional materials, such as polycarbonates, can dramatically improve the material’s ability to absorb vibrations, especially at high temperatures, according to US researchers. The discovery could lead to new composites for aerospace and automobile engineering applications as well as improving golf clubs and other sports equipment. You can read the complete story in this month’s Reactive Reports.

Good Corrosion

Chemical corrosion impacts on global commercial turnover significantly as equipment, buildings, and transportation systems have to be continually maintained to combat its effects. Chemists ever looking for the silver lining, however, have recognized that chemical attack of metal surfaces is not all bad and might be exploited to produce useful nanoscale surface features with potential technological applications in catalysis, sensors, and other areas. Read on in the latest issue of Reactive Reports

Interview with NMR Expert Gary Martin

In the latest issue of the Reactive Reports chemistry webzine, we interview NMR expert Gary Martin about his experiences with this powerful analytical technique and his views on the future of the technology and novel applications.

Martin spent the first 14 years of his career at the University of Houston before moving to Burroughs Wellcome, Co., in 1989, and then to Upjohn in 1996, which, through a series of mergers and acquisitions, left him working for Pfizer a few years ago. He has spent much of his career focused on the identification of natural product structures and subsequently synthetic compounds originating in drug discovery, and more recently the identification of impurity and degradant structures of drug molecules. In the Spring, he takes up a new position at Schering-Plough’s facility in Summit, New Jersey, where he will no doubt use his pioneering NMR techniques to the full once more.

Voodoo Insecticide

Regular visitor Rob Bowen emailed to tell me about the TechNeed site. Apparently, these guys want suggestions on how to create a chemical-free way to get rid of pests that won’t stain the carpet.

Well, efforts to find anything that is chemical free are doomed to failure from the off, unless you’re talking some energy form. Presumably, the chemophobics who write the site mean they want a physical method rather than something that relies on a compound acting as insecticide, which is fair enough.

But, Rob reckons the constraints they apply to their request for such a chemical-free pest remover are so tight that the only thing approach left is voodoo.

So, we’ll wait with interest to see if a commercially viable product emerges from this call to arms. I reckon they could cross-market it with those magnetic water softeners you wrap around your standpipe that are supposed to reduce limescale build up.

File under “pseudoscientific claptrap”

Protein Crystals Trapped

The bane of protein crystallographers is the common problem of proteins that simply will not crystallize. This is especially poignant when it comes to some of the more biomedically interesting of their number, such as the numerous membrane proteins, many of which do not succumb to even the most sophisticated crystallization techniques. Now, researchers at Imperial College London and the University of Surrey, both in the UK, have developed a new technique for crystallizing proteins, which could open up a whole range of materials to this powerful analytical technique.

Read my complete report in the Reactive Reports chemistry webzine

Chemistry World Calendar

If you’re a Chemistry World reader you may have their freebie wallplanner tacked to the pinboard in your lab. But, watch out when you’re booking meetings towards the end of June this year. In their efforts to get as many conference ads into the chart, publisher the Royal Society of Chemistry skips a beat, with Friday June 30 leaping to Wednesday July 1.

Of course, if you’re using the freebie wallplanner from almost any other learned society, you’d know that July 1 is on a Saturday this year.

Say NO to Straddling Molecules

“Imagine you are standing, John Wayne style, on the backs of two runaway horses pulling a stagecoach. You try to bring the horses to a stop but instead the harnesses break, the horses separate, and an unlucky passenger gets thrown from the stage.”

That’s how the latest chemistry news release from Sandia National Laboratories. Poetic in its own way, I suppose, but couldn’t they have got the scientist in question Carl Hayden to put on a ten-gallon hat for the photo shoot at least?

The news release goes on to explain how he and colleagues at SNL and the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada, and elsewhere, straddled a molecule by, in effect, standing on pair after pair of joined nitric oxide molecules (NO dimers) and watching as each pair split after being excited by an ultrashort laser pulse.

The researchers not only measured the direction of each separating NO molecule but also the direction and energy of an electron spat out as each molecular break up occurred. The electron reveals the quantum energy levels of the dimer as it separates.

Then, computer back calculations from the final speeds and angles provided the team with a way to reconstruct the event and so “see” the exact path the electron and each dimer fragment had taken, exactly as though they had ridden on the dimers as they split.

The detailed experimental results, reported in Science, allow the team to test the computational methods used for combustion and atmospheric modelling involving NO.

Chemical wedding anniversary gifts

Most people have heard of the traditional wedding anniversary gifts – silver, ruby, gold, cotton, paper etc, but we’ve compiled a list of wedding anniversary gifts aimed at the chemical couple in your life. So, if you’re looking to celebrate a stable bond take a look, but please avoid if you’re easily offended, some of the entries might cause a reaction.