Category Archives: Chemistry

OTTAWA, May 28, 2012 /CNW/ - The Chemistry Industry Association of Canada supports the federal government's back-to-work legislation requiring the appointment of an arbitrator to resolve outstanding disputes between Canadian Pacific Railway and its 4,800 striking employees.

CIAC's member-companies rely on rail to ship more than 70 per cent of their products, and the CP strike has hindered their ability to get those products to market. If the strike were to continue, some CIAC plants could be forced to reduce their production by the end of this week.

CIAC estimates that the 2007 rail strike cost chemistry companies - and the Canadian economy - in the order of $200 million dollars. When a chemical plant cannot deliver its products to market, the effects can be felt throughout the economy in sectors such as energy, housing, automobiles, pulp and paper, and consumer products - all of which rely on inputs from the chemistry industry. There can be health and safety implications as well; the industry's chemicals are essential for many Canadian municipalities to treat their water.

On May 22, 2012, CIAC President Richard Paton sent a letter to Labour Minister Lisa Raitt (now posted on http://www.canadianchemistry.ca) urging a quick resolution to the CP strike. The government's back-to-work legislation is an appropriate response to the chemistry industry's calls for action; it will mitigate further economic loss, and prevent damage to Canada's reputation as a reliable link in global supply-chains.

Fiona Cook Director Business & Economics Chemistry Industry Association of Canada 613-297-0509

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Chemistry industry applauds federal government's action to end CP strike

Feb. 24, 1980April 27, 2012

A beloved chemistry teacher and varsity baseball coach who taught his students in Florida to rise above will be remembered Saturday at the Wales Center Community Baptist Church.

Justin M. Kunick was born in Naperville, Ill., and moved to Wales Center when he was four. He graduated from Iroquois High School in 1998 and then from Keuka College in 2002, where he played on the varsity baseball team, setting several team records.

From the time he was a newborn, Mr. Kunick struggled with heart problems but always overcame them with admirable determination. Ailments left him temporarily paralyzed on the right side of his body when he was a toddler. His family believes thats how he ended up a left-handed pitcher.

After working as a substitute teacher for a couple of years in Michigan, Mr. Kunick landed a full-time teaching job in Hudson, Fla.

Mr. Kunick had become the varsity coach at Fivay High School when, in January, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Through his surgeries and chemotherapy, Kunick continued coaching from his hospital bed with the help of his father. Terry Kunick would call his son after each inning to report on how the team was doing.

Their final game, he coached from his hospice bed, Terry Kunick said.

Mr. Kunick died April 27 while in hospice in New Port Richey. He was 32.

He is survived by his father and mother, Marilyn Kunick; his wife, the former Anne Hastie; a brother, Joseph; and two sisters, Jeanette Wolff and Jody Smaszcz.

A memorial service will be held at 4 p.m. Saturday in the Wales Center Community Baptist Church, with friends and family gathering an hour beforehand.

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Justin M. Kunick, chemistry teacher, baseball coach

Josh Brolin says he had a special chemistry with Will Smith when filming 'Men In Black 3'.

Josh Brolin says he had a special chemistry with Will Smith.

The 'No Country For Old Men' actor has revealed the natural chemistry and banter he shared with his 'Men In Black 3' comedy partner was one of a kind.

He said: ''When the camera rolls, something happens. It was very nice, I hadn't felt that with a lot of people. Usually you have to act at acting well. With Will Smith and I, something just happens when those cameras start rolling.

''And we're very different people, but I think we are both very mischievous in our own way (laughs), so we were having fun with this kind of back and forth, cat and mouse thing.

''But it's not a cat and mouse, it's something different. It was follying, it was a lot of fun! We created our own thing so it became less about how am I going to do Tommy Lee Jones, more in finding a rendition of Tommy, and then making it our own.''

Barry Sonnenfield's latest flick sees Josh play a young version of Tommy Lee Jones' character, Agent K, who teams up with Agent J (Will) when they go back in time to save the world.

The 44-year-old 'Goonies' star said that he knew from the very first ''make or break'' scene the pair shot together that the film was going to work.

Speaking about his favourite memory from filming, he added to Flicksandbits.com: ''The first scene me and Will shot was the first scene that's in the movie with us together. When I'm sitting there looking at J, who's looking around at all the 60s motif, and then he looks at me and he's telling me something and I say, 'How do you know my name?'

''That was the first scene we did in the movie, so that was an exciting moment for me because that's a make or break moment. All the talking and the rehearsing, all of the studying we did, it comes down to that moment. It was the moment of, 'Is this going to work or not?' That was a great moment.''

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Josh Brolin - Josh Brolin Shares Special Chemistry With Will Smith

Nickel tetracarbonyl - highly unpleasant, but extremely useful (Credit: Wikimedia commons/ Benjah-bmm27)

For my contribution to Sciencegeist’s toxic blog carnival, I decided to write about a decidedly enigmatic compound. Nickel tetracarbonyl is a transition metal complex but also a foul-smelling (and, given the context of this blog post, naturally highly toxic) gas. These are not generally two molecular properties that coincide. It also forms quite easily when nickel metal comes into contact with carbon monoxide.

Having not personally worked with it, I nevertheless respect and admire nickel tetracarbonyl from afar. However, this is a compound which can provoke intensely personal reactions from people who have had the opportunity to get a little more hands-on. I came across possibly one of the most vivid of these in our Chemistry in its element podcast series when Bernie Bulkin described his initiation into a lab working on metal carbonyl complexes:

‘One of the first things I was given to read when I started was the summary of the toxicological effects of nickel carbonyl.  I learned, with some concern, that at 30ppm it was certainly fatal, and even a significantly lower dose of 3ppm caused death in 50% of a group of test animals.

‘When you breathe it in, it decomposes, giving you a dose of carbon monoxide and depositing some nickel on your lungs. If you survive the first few hours, the nickel causes a form of pneumonia, coughing, breathlessness, extreme fatigue.  This lasts for several days, often resulting in cardiovascular or renal failure and death.  I was relieved to find that the safety precautions in the lab were extremely rigorous.’

The concept of receiving a bolus dose of carbon monoxide – deadly enough in its own right as described in Patrick’s blog yesterday – plus the added spice of nickel-plated lungs, was enough to imprint an instant respect for the compound in my mind.

So why on Earth might we want to make or use this compound, given its extreme potential to cause harm?

Nickel as a metal is industrially important – it is hard, shiny and reasonably resistant to corrosion (except by carbon monoxide of course…). Alloyed into steel or plated over the surface it endows the metal with these useful properties too, so much so that it was used to make coins (before being largely replaced by iron, which is cheaper and doesn’t cause the same kind of skin irritation that some people experience when handling nickel). Some coins, particularly the US five-cent pieces known as ‘nickels’, still contain nickel alloyed with copper or plated on the surface of a steel blank.

Nickel’s hardness and corrosion resistance also makes it ideal as the basis for superalloys used to make jet engine turbine blades. These are generally grown as single crystals of the metal for optimum performance at the high temperatures and force loadings of a working jet engine.

So where does nickel carbonyl fit in?

Nickel is rarely found in ores on its own – it is usually combined with its transition metal neighbours iron and cobalt. In fact, the name nickel comes from colloquial German for ‘devil’ (think of ‘Old Nick’ in English folklore) and cobalt derives from the word for a gremlin or hobgoblin, reflecting their role as annoying impurities in iron ores. So a method for separating the metals would not only deliver the desirable nickel, but improve processes for purifying iron and cobalt as well.

Having discovered nickel carbonyl by accident, Ludwig Mond – a German chemist – found that nickel reacts with carbon monoxide much more quickly than does either iron or cobalt. As a savvy businessman, he realised the potential of this observation and, in the late 19th century, developed it into the Mond process for extracting nickel from mixed ores. Reacting impure nickel with CO releases it as gaseous nickel carbonyl and leaves behind the impurities. The nickel can then be reclaimed by heating the complex until it decomposes. This process is still used when the purest nickel (greater than 99.99% pure) is required.

From a research chemistry point of view, nickel complexes form a variety of useful catalysts. Many of these are prepared from nickel carbonyl in some form, owing to the ease of displacing the carbonyl ligands. However, the chemist aspiring to prepare such catalysts would be well advised to seek out alternative sources of nickel in which someone else has already done the carbonyl substitutions – nickel plated lungs and death by suffocation or pneumonia is certainly not to be recommended…

Phillip Broadwith

                  

Source:
http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/?feed=rss2

Over at Sciencegeist they’ve throw down the gauntlet and asked bloggers to write about their favourite toxic chemical as part of a carnival of toxins that also play important roles in everyday life. It’s all part of the campaign by chemists and bloggers alike against ‘chemophobia’ – an irrational fear of the chemicals we find all around us in everyday life or even the very word ‘chemical’. Recently there seems to have been a spate of these articles in newspapers with chemical-free labels even popping up in labs where they ought to be choosing their words with a little more care!

Canaries provided a CO early warning system for miners

So I’m going to kick off Chemistry World’s contribution to the carnival with carbon monoxide: the silent killer. It’s now pretty much common knowledge that this diatomic molecule can kill, thanks to television images of people committing suicide by gassing themselves with car exhausts (this is much less likely today as catalytic converters mop up and transform much of the CO in exhaust fumes) and public health campaigns highlighting the dangers of the gas in the home. But John Scott Haldane, the father of noted geneticist J B S Haldane, was the first to realise that this colourless, odourless gas was responsible for the deaths of many miners. The CO that killed these miners was the result of incomplete combustion of carbon during coal dust explosions. J S Haldane, belonging to that intrepid class of chemists that is all but extinct now, used himself as a guinea pig to investigate the effects of CO. By exposed himself to potentially lethal doses of the chemical, he discovered the dangers it posed, which led to the introduction of canaries in mines as early warning signals of danger. Good for miners, bad for canaries! You can hear more about J S Haldane in Chemistry World’s podcast on carbon monoxide.

CO’s killing power comes from its affinity for the haemoglobin in red blood cells, binding to it preferentially over oxygen to form carboxyhaemoglobin. People exposed to CO are figuratively drowning in air – there’s plenty of oxygen all around them but their bodies just can’t absorb enough of it. And, in a grisly twist, carboxyhaemoglobin is bright red, giving victims of CO poisoning a hale and hearty rosy hue.

Unsurprisingly, this has led to boilers, and the deadly gas they can produce, becoming inextricably linked in people’s minds with danger – to be guarded against in the home and on holiday. In the US alone, it is estimated that 40,000 people seek medical attention for CO poisoning each year, so it’s clear it’s still a serious problem.

That’s the dark side of CO, but is there a lighter side? Oddly enough, it was discovered in the 1990s that this deadly gas has a memorable and vital physiological function. It acts as a neurotransmitter in certain parts of the brain involved in long-term memory and has functions in many other parts of the body that are only just being understood. CO joins hydrogen sulfide and nitric oxide as another small and toxic gaseous molecule, which is a vital poison that our bodies both produce and need to function properly. As a result, companies like Alfama are now developing drugs that release CO in minute amounts to treat diseases involving inflammation and a range of other conditions. This turnaround in the way CO is now viewed really gives wings to the old axiom ‘the dose makes the poison’.

Patrick Walter

                  

Source:
http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/?feed=rss2

 It’s a stalwart of the undergraduate lab and can still be found introducing kids to the joys of science in even today’s modest chemistry sets. But potassium permanganate is good for much more than pretty colours and redox titrations… in fact, it could well save your life. Brian Clegg praises our purple pal in this week’s Chemistry in its element podcast.

                  

Source:
http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/?feed=rss2