Category Archives: Chemistry

(credit: Al Bello/Getty Images)

By Rich Coutinho More Columns

Over the course of a long baseball season, there will be ups and downs, injuries curtailing winning streaks. But allsuccessful teams have one constant: leadership.

Chemistry in the clubhouse.

It can extend winning streaks and snap losing streaks. The Mets have great chemistry, and thats been been of the biggest reasons New York sits in second place in the competitive NL East.

They came into the season with all the experts saying they had too many holes, not enough depth and inferior starting pitching. The fans, for the most part, bought that snow job hook, line and sinker. Thats all they heard from the media. But make no mistake about it the Metsare serious playoff contenders 50 games into the season.

Thatsright Iused the P word.

You want leadership? There are no better in this sport than Johan Santana and David Wright, who lead the right way. They dont do it for the world to see by throwing over a table or scolding a teammate. They do it by example. The younger players see Wright and Santana are the first to arrive, embrace their responsibility to the media, and compete.

Terry Collins deserves a bunch of credit for motivating these players, and so does his coaching staff. Consider the job Tim Teufel has done with Daniel Murphy at second base. Murphy will never be confused with Bill Mazeroski around the bag, but he has been serviceable due in large part to the amount of work he and Teufel put in during the offseason. And that has kept his potent bat in the lineup.

The numbers dont lie. The Metsare 16-10 at Citi Field and 12-12 on the road, the formula for a winning season. Theyre also 15-8 against the National League East, which is why they are only one and half games from the top spot in the division. What they lack in talent they make up for in resiliency, and that speaks to team chemistry. I have never been around a team that pulls for each other like this team even when one player is in competition with another for playing time.

Read the rest here:
Coutinho: Great Team Chemistry Has Fueled Mets’ Success

Source: ISNA

Chemistry Nobel Laureate Peter Agre, Professor and Director of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute and Dr. Norman Neureiter the Acting Director of Center for Science, Technology & Security Policy of American Association for the Advancement of Science and the first US scientific ambassador to Europe are to arrive in Tehran in coming days.

Dr, Norman Neureiter is scheduled to deliver a lecture on "International Cooperation on Science and Technology Diplomacy, Opportunities and Challenges in the 21 Century" in Iranian Shahid Beheshti University on June 11.

Also Professor Peter Agre will attend the ceremony.

Peter Agre born on January 30, 1949 is an American medical doctor, professor, and molecular biologist who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (which he shared with Roderick MacKinnon for his discovery of aquaporins. Aquaporins are water-channel proteins that move water molecules through the cell membrane.

In February 2009, Peter Agre was inducted as the 163rd president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the nation's largest scientific organization. He is currently a professor at Johns Hopkins University.

He received his B.A. from Augsburg College in Minneapolis and his M.D. in 1974 from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

From 1975 to 1978 he completed his clinical training in Internal Medicine at Case Western Reserve University's Case Medical Center under Charles C.J. Carpenter.

He served as the Vice Chancellor for science and technology at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, where he guided the development of Duke's biomedical research.

Read the original:
US Chemistry Nobel Laureate to arrive in Tehran

Credit: Nathan Walker, CC BY 2.0

Dave Kepler, chief sustainability officer at Dow Chemical Co., believes that to meet the demands of a burgeoning population, we will need more sustainable products and infrastructure in short, a more sustainable economy.

Writing for GreenBiz, Kepler says sustainable chemistry will play a key role in meeting the increasing demands for material goods in an environment of tight resources and energy supply. He writes that more than 95 percent of manufactured goods rely on certain chemical building blocks somewhere in their value chains that is, basic chemicals from which other chemicals get made. For that reason, integrating sustainability and green chemistry concepts sustainable chemistry as a building block is a vitally important part of building a more sustainable economy.

Dows sustainability strategy includes a set of four pillars of sustainable chemistry:

Kepler says Dows green chemistry efforts have led to products such as roofing shingles with integrated photovoltaics that make harnessing the power of the sun affordable, advanced lithium-ion batteries for improved hybrid and electric vehicle efficiency, corn seed traits that increase crop productivity and a joint venture with Mitsui in Brazil to make plastics from sugar cane.

That last detail making plastics from sugar cane is intriguing, especially in light of a recent article, Status Report: Green Chemistry for Polymers, by Sally Humphreys of research firm Applied Market Information. The article discusses a wide variety of efforts in the plastics industry to employ biological substitutes for fossil fuels as feedstocks for producing polymers.

Humphreys also highlights efforts in Brazil to produce plastics from sugar cane:

The Brazilian sugar cane industry is the largest in the world. [Brazilian petrochemical firm] Braskem has used this sugar as a source of feedstock to make its green polyethylene and polypropylene with current capacities at 200 and 30 kilotonnes per year respectively. 86.5 tons of sugar cane gives 7,200 liters of ethanol and 3 tonnes of polyethylene. Brazil has vast areas of arable land that could be used to develop this industry and Braskem is studying all aspects including ways to increase yield.

Sugar cane field in Brazil. Credit: Maria Hsu, CC BY 2.0

As another example, Ford Motor Co. has been testing the use of a soy polyol-based polyurethane foam, a bio-thermoplastic urethane (TPU) developed from renewable sources.

See the original post:
Green Chemistry Carving a Bigger Role in Sustainable Manufacturing

Wayne State University's Department of Chemistry is among the top 100 in the world, according to the latest ranking by the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). More than 1,000 universities were ranked in 2011, and the best 500 are published at http://www.shanghairanking.com/.

The ARWU uses six indicators to determine rankings. WSU received high marks in three: highly cited researchers, papers in the Science Citation Index, and percentage of papers published in the top 20 percent of journals.

"The chemistry department is excited to learn that we have been ranked among the elite chemistry departments in the world.Our inclusion among the best in the world is a welcome recognition of our efforts over the last several years to make Wayne State chemistrytruly first-rate in both teaching and research.With the recent opening of the newly renovated A. Paul Schaap Chemistry Building, we are well-positioned to move to the next level of excellence," said Jim Rigby, chemistry department chair.

The only other Michigan university receiving top 100 honors in chemistry was the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

The ARWU uses six indicators to determine rankings. WSU received high marks in three: highly cited researchers, papers in the Science Citation Index, and percentage of papers published in the top 20 percent of journals.

"The chemistry department is excited to learn that we have been ranked among the elite chemistry departments in the world.Our inclusion among the best in the world is a welcome recognition of our efforts over the last several years to make Wayne State chemistrytruly first-rate in both teaching and research.With the recent opening of the newly renovated A. Paul Schaap Chemistry Building, we are well-positioned to move to the next level of excellence," said Jim Rigby, chemistry department chair.

The only other Michigan university receiving top 100 honors in chemistry was the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

View original post here:
WAYNE COUNTY: Wayne State chemistry department among top 100 worldwide

My son, Alexander, is completing his high school career by taking chemistry and physics.

Which makes him 50 percent smarter than I am.

Or maybe its 100 percent.

Im equally lost among the precepts of mathematics as I am fumbling around in convoluted formulas of chemistry and the insane concepts of physics.

This is why I labored through only chemistry in high school, achieving, by way of the dogged determination that is the clueless students only advantage, a flaccid C.

(I was pretty deft with a Bunsen burner, as well. And one time I tried to make nitroglycerine, a failed effort that seemed to amuse the teacher. Probably because I didnt hurt anyone.)

I have few distinct memories from chemistry class, but one retains that crystalline quality which our brains, in some cruel twist of human evolution, reserve for our most embarrassing episodes.

(Actually only part of the memory is still vivid; I have no recollection at all of the details of the problem we were supposed to solve.)

The occasion was a particularly rare one: An experiment that seemed to me, if not logical, at least understandable.

I volunteered to walk up to the blackboard (it was in fact green, but, as with the black kind, you wrote on it with chalk) and demonstrate the equation.

See the original post:
Like father (not) like son: Showed up in chemistry class

Photo courtesy of Foster Photography Katie Hogan

EAST NAPLES When Katie Hogan took chemistry during her junior year at Lely High School, she was hooked.

"Everyone was complaining about how hard it was," Katie said as she sat in the library on her last day of school. "I said, 'It's not hard, it's easy.' I ended up helping other students. Science has always been easy for me."

So she asked her mother, Jackie, a pharmaceutical rep, what career was most like chemistry and began working toward that goal.

"Some jobs aren't needed anymore, but people always need medicine," the 18-year-old said. "Pharmacology, I feel like it will always be there."

Katie, who has a 3.869 gpa, is Lely's 2012 Graduate of Distinction. She juggled a full course load in addition to being an award-winning sports captain, volunteering and completing an online pre-calculus class for an extra math credit.

"It takes a lot of self-motivation," said Chris Black, the school's librarian and media specialist, who saw her working online every day. "Math is not an easy subject without someone to teach you."

Black, the school running coach and Katie's coach since seventh grade, called her "one of the best," a seventh-grader who excelled and continued getting better.

"No matter what she does, whether it's athletics or school work, she does whatever you ask her to and she does her best and always has a smile," he said. "She even runs with a smile."

Last week, Katie was awarded the Bright Futures Medallion, meaning 50 percent of her tuition is paid for at a state school. Katie, who lives with her mother; stepfather, Mark Urban; and brother, Danny, originally wanted to go to Florida State University in Tallahassee, but instead chose University of Central Florida in Orlando.

Read the original post:
Class of '12: Lely graduate had good chemistry with school studies