Category Archives: Chemistry

With goggles covering their eyes and gloves protecting their hands, laughing children splattered their shirts as they learned to tie-dye.

The activity was part of this week's Colorful Chemistry camp offered by the Northwest Ottawa Recreational Authority at Lakeshore Middle School.

NORA Recreation Programmer Gentry Soule said the organization offers a variety of athletic programs in addition to the science camps, which included Polymer Palooza and Water Wonders.

Not every kid can play sports, so we want something for those kids, too, she said.

During the four-day camp, the third- through fifth-grade students spent two hours a day participating in a variety of activities making bouncy balls, slime and bubble wands. They also watched a fire demonstration by their instructor, Melissa Jaeger.

Jaeger said she enjoys watching the excitement on the kids faces when theyre in awe of an activity. How excited they get (is the best part), she said.

Jaeger, a seventh-grade science and math teacher at Lakeshore Middle School, ran the NORA Science camps with her husband, George.

Melissa Jaeger said the camp is 90 percent fun. Once the students finished an activity, she explained the scientific process behind it.

To read more of this story, see todays print or e-edition of the Grand Haven Tribune.

For more photos from the camp, see the "Colorful Chemistry" photo gallery.

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Colorful Chemistry

A bequest from the estate of Margaret Kirkwood Philipsborn has established an endowed professorship in Yales Department of Chemistry. Named in memory of her brother, John Gamble Kirkwood, the professorship will support a full-time faculty member in the area of theoretical chemistry.

Kirkwood was a member of Yales faculty from 1951 until his death in 1959 at age 52. Known for his groundbreaking work in statistical mechanics, theory of liquids, and statistical physics, he served as chair of Yales chemistry department and was named as a Sterling Professor, Yales highest faculty honor.

The bequest comes at an important time for Yales growing chemistry department, which ranks among the top 15 departments nationally and has been home to Nobel Prize-winners such as Lars Onsager and Thomas Steitz. The department plans to hire as many as five new faculty members.

John Kirkwood was a giant in his field, and he was also a dedicated mentor and administrator, said President Richard C. Levin. This generous bequest from Mrs. Philipsborn will help the University and the chemistry department advance a tradition of excellence in teaching and research.

Our ambition is to continue to be a powerhouse in theoretical science, added Scott J. Miller, the Irne du Pont Professor and chemistry department chair. Many students are drawn to theoretical chemistry, as it touches on all aspects of the field. We need to meet this demand with a faculty of the highest caliber.

Yale Provost Peter Salovey recently called the chemistry department one of the jewels of Science Hill, a corner of campus in the midst of a dramatic upgrade. In 2005, the department moved into the state-of-the-art Class of 1954 Chemistry Research Building and will take advantage of renovated Sterling and Kline Chemistry Laboratories in the coming years. These physical improvements are occurring in tandem with a campus-wide effort to create a new model for teaching in the STEM fields science, technology, engineering, and mathematics focused on active learning for undergraduates.

John Gamble Jack Kirkwood was born in 1907 and raised in Wichita, Kansas. Following a distinguished career at Cornell University and the California Institute of Technology, he arrived at Yale in 1951 and was named a Sterling Professor in 1956. In addition to serving as chair of the chemistry department, he later was the Universitys director of science. A winner of the 1936 American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Kirkwood died of cancer in 1959, and is buried in Grove Street Cemetery next to his contemporary Lars Onsager.

Since 1962, Yales chemistry department and the New Haven section of the American Chemical Society have awarded the John Gamble Kirkwood Award, which honors outstanding theoretical or experimental research in the physical sciences.

A freelance journalist, Margaret Kirkwood Philipsborn was born in 1921 in Wichita, and lived mostly in London and Chicago until her death in 2011 at age 90. In her later years, she frequently communicated with Yale and its chemistry department and visited campus in the 1990s to present the Kirkwood Award. Everyone that met her knew her to be an especially kind and generous person, Miller said. In particular, she was very thoughtful about how to celebrate her brothers scientific contributions.

Our family is enormously proud of Uncle Jacks achievements, and my aunt very much wanted to honor his legacy by supporting the field he so loved, said Rob Bonner, Philipsborns nephew.

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Chemistry’s newest endowed chair honors pioneering Yale scientist John Gamble Kirkwood

Attention! This competition isnt only open to writersproducers, you are also welcome. The joy. Science communication isnt only about great proses but also about effective multimedia reports. As such, this competition has two categories: writing and multimedia.

Chemistry World, a popular magazine published by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), and ChemCareers invite budding science reporters, students, postgrads and early-career scientists around the world to participate in their first science communication competition. Writers can write any piece they want (be in news, opinion, feature) in a maximum of 800 words while producers should come up with an audio or video documentary of 5 minutes or less. Your awesome works must of course be related to the chemical sciences and should be sent in before August 31.

Your work will be reviewed by well-respected science journalists and academics such as the Financial Timess science correspondent, Clive Cookson, and the RSCs soon-to-president Prof. Lesley Yellowlees. Even more exciting perhaps, 20 participants will be shortlisted and invited to a (very sciencey) reception on October 10 in London. The winners of each category will have their work published in Chemistry World and pocket a cool 300 (about $465). An equally cool 100 (about $155) to each runner-up.

So, to recap: open to participants from around the world, both writing and multimedia, related to the chemical sciences, 20 shortlisted participants to attend cool reception in London, winners get published in Chemistry World and win 300 cash prize.

You should be interested so here are the details in more comprehensive point form:

More info:

Best of luck to you.

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Science Writing And Multimedia Competition By Chemistry World

In late June, the American Chemical Society (ACS), a nonprofit organization chartered by Congress, held its 16th annual Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference in Washington, D.C. The conference, which was sponsored by the American Chemical Societys Green Chemistry Institute (ACS GCI), had a theme this year of Innovation, Jobs, Sustainability The Role of Green Chemistry. A number of noteworthy new green chemistry processes were presented at the event.

Textile manufacturing involves some of the worlds most resource-wasting processes. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, it takes about 2,900 gallons of water to produce a single pair of jeans. Most of this water is used in whats known as wet processing, as well as in the dyeing of fabric.

Specialty chemicals company Clariant may soon change that. It has debuted a new process called Advanced Denim, which it says can produce a pair of jeans using up to 92 percent less water and up to 30 percent less energy than conventional methods. The process also generates up to 87 percent less cotton waste (which is often burned) and virtually no waste water, according to Miguel Sanchez, a textile engineer at Clariant.

While traditional denim production requires up to 15 dyeing vats that contain a cocktail of chemicals, Clariants process uses a single vat of liquid sulfur dyes that require only a single, sugar-based reducing agent, says Sanchez. The reducing agent, sodium hydrosulfite, is a much greener alternative to traditional reducing agents.

The result is a more eco-friendly process that cuts out most of the waste from traditional jean production. Sanchez says that if even one-quarter of the jeans produced in the world were made via the Advanced Denim process, enough water about 2.5 billion gallons would be saved to cover the needs of 1.7 million people each year. It would also prevent the release of 8.3 million cubic meters of wastewater each year and save up to 220 million kilowatt hours of electricity. At the same time, it would cut down carbon dioxide emissions significantly.

The jeans produced via Advanced Denim look similar to other commercially produced jeans, or even better, Sanchez says. Clariant claims that the process can produce looks and effects not possible today with current technologies.

One thing the world has a lot of today is algae. One thing its getting short on is fuel. For years, scientists have been searching for ways to make fuel out of algae, and many have succeeded at least in the lab. Its an economical process that, thus far, has eluded most researchers.

At the Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference, a team of researchers from Yale University presented a breakthrough toward a long-sought viable process, which turns algae into biodiesel.

The new process extracts from algae fatty molecules called lipids and transforms them into usable fuel in a single process. It would make biodiesel from algae much cheaper, faster and greener than current multistep methods that require separate stages and chemicals. The reaction involves supercritical carbon dioxide, which at elevated pressures and temperatures fills its container like a gas but is as dense as a liquid, according to the researchers.

Algae has great promise as a next-generation biofuel, a fuel that is sustainable and renewable, says research team leader Julie Zimmerman,

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New Breakthroughs Propel the Field of Green Chemistry

Kendall N. Houk holds UCLAs Saul Winstein Chair in Organic Chemistry. (Credit: Reed Hutchinson/UCLA)

(Phys.org) -- In 1928, chemists Otto Diels and Kurt Alder first documented diene synthesis, a chemical reaction important for synthesizing many polymers, alkaloids and steroids. Their work on this mechanism, which came to be known as the DielsAlder reaction, won them the 1950 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Since then, the iconic reaction has become the most commonly used and studied mechanism in organic chemistry. But what happens during the reaction has never been entirely clear.

Now, Kendall N. Houk, UCLA's Saul Winstein Professor of Organic Chemistry, and colleagues report exactly how the DielsAlder reaction occurs. Their research is published this week in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and will be published in an upcoming print edition.

"We have examined the molecular dynamics of the DielsAlder reaction, which has become the most important reaction in synthesis, in detail to understand how it happens," said Houk, who is a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.

Houk and his colleagues created a number of simulations he calls them short movies of molecules coming together and reacting.

One of Houk's DielsAlder movies:

(Houk isn't the only one making movies about DielsAlder. UCLA organic chemistry students in Professor Neil Garg's class have produced a series of amusing music videos in which they reference the reaction: Watch "Chemistry Jock" [reference at 2:08], "Hey There Neil Garg" [1:44] and "Payphone" [1:07].)

"The idea," Houk said, "is to understand how the reaction happens not just that A goes to B and B goes to C, but to actually follow how the bonds are forming and how the atoms are moving as these things come together. Using the massive computing power we have now, we get a degree of resolution of the mechanism that was not really possible before. It took a lot of computer time, but as a result, we now have unprecedented insight into how this reaction occurs."

Organic chemists have argued about this for years: If two bonds form during a reaction, do they form at the same time, or does one form first and then the other?

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New insights into how the most iconic reaction in organic chemistry really works

Over on the BBC Nature site is an amazing story explaining how the cold, desolate Antarctic, with poor quality soil, can play host to several species of moss and the reason is enough to get anyone with a slightly childish mind (including me) excited – frozen penguin poo.

— Arctic moss can grow into large beds despite the harsh environment

The elevated site in East Antarctica hasn’t had any penguins for several thousand years but between 3000 and 8000 years ago the site was home to a colony of Adelie penguins, as evidenced by the remains of the penguins’ rock nests and the nutrients from the birds’ poo. In the BBC story they just say that a ‘chemical signature’ shows that the nitrogen in the soil passed through a marine predator, so what does this mean? Well at a wild guess I figured this might be something to do with our good friends isotopic ratios. Long used to date and trace the origin of archaeological finds, in recent years ecologists have started to use the technique to map food webs.

You see, it seems that soil that has been pooed on by seabirds is enriched with more ¹⁵N than normal, but why? Well, when producing urea and uric acid, ¹⁴N is preferentially used and then excreted, leaving behind more ¹⁵N than found in the environment. This, I suspect, is due to the kinetic isotope effect, making the rates of reactions using ¹⁴N faster than those using the heavier element. Any predator will then ingest more ¹⁵N and further concentrate it, until you get up to the apex predator. Therefore a predator high up the food chain, like penguins, will have a higher concentration of ¹⁵N in their flesh, and presumably their poo will have an isotopic ratio reflecting their isotopically enriched diet.

Of course, this has got me wondering whether that means we’re also ¹⁵N enriched due to our protein heavy diets? Could you even distinguish a seafood eater from a meat eater and/or a vegetarian based on the amount of ¹⁵N in our bodies? Well I’m behind the times: there are studies doing just that to work out the diets of our predecessors and suggestions that the same can be used to diagnose eating disorders.

So now you that it’s the remains of ancient penguin poo that fertilised the Antarctic, creating a habitat for small insects and other animals, and how that was worked out.

Laura Howes

                  

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