Category Archives: Chemistry

It has been brought to our attention here at the Chemistry World cabana that one of our staff has been the victim of a vile plot to impersonate a science journalist. In a staggering revelation, we have learned that a professional actor has been hired to masquerade as our beloved Philip Robinson.

The real Philip Robinson

An imposter

The architects of this nefarious scheme remain unknown and their motives are as yet unclear but the implications would appear to be sinister in the extreme. We can only assume that our brave and handsome reporter was getting too close to the truth and those in danger of being exposed have sought to damage and discredit his good actual name. Rest assured, the RSC has been quick to respond and has issued a statement to the press, exposing the fraudster. But fear not, dear readers, such cowardly tactics will not intimidate us. The truth will out – Chemistry World will not be silenced.

The writer wishes to remain anonymous

                  

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

The Cavaliers' losing streak reached five games last night following a 87-75 loss to the Detroit Pistons at The Q. The Cavs have lost 8 of 9, with 6 of those losses by at least 10 points.

In today's Comment of the Day, Slimshady blames the struggles on the trade of Ramon Sessions and the release of Ryan Hollins,

"The Cavs chemistry they had before with Sessions & Hollins being dumped and the injury to Boobie is gone. The trade of Ramon Sessions has killed the Cavs. He was the second best guard on the team. Sloan & Harris are just bodies that breath that's all. The team is gutted with the trade of Ramon and the dumping of Hollins. What the Cavs team lacked in talent they made up with in chemistry, energy & coaching. The Cavs used to be fun to watch this season but now they are horrible after they were gutted."

Are the Cavaliers unwatchable? With four picks in the upcoming draft, are you OK with that? Get in on the discussion below.

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Cavaliers have no chemistry: Comment of the Day

OU chemistry professor receives Oklahoma Chemist of the Year award

Hailing from a small Oklahoma town, one OU alumna and faculty member has been picked from among all research chemists in Oklahoma to receive a statewide award.

OU chemistry professor Donna Nelson received the award for Oklahoma Chemist of the Year March 17 for her research with single-wall carbon nanotubes, alkenes reactions and organic chemistry education.

Nelson has researched carbon nanotubes, a new form of carbon used to change the characteristics of polymers, for five of six years, she said.

Her research with alkenes reactions, used to form compounds like alcohol, and organic chemistry education has spanned two decades, she said. She has published in all three areas.

This award is particularly special to Nelson because of her ties to the state, she said.

I have won a lot of other awards, national-level awards, and Id have to fly away and accept awards in different cities like Chicago or Washington D.C. ... but its always nice to be recognized at ones home, Nelson said.

Nelson has taught organic chemistry at OU for 25 years, OU President David Boren said in an email.

Boren wrote one of the letters of recommendation for Nelson when she applied for the honor.

She has inspired thousands of students to enter into the field of chemistry, Boren said in an email. More importantly, she encourages her students to pass this passion for science to younger generations by serving as mentors for high school chemistry students.

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OU chemistry professor receives Oklahoma Chemist of the Year award

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE: Monday, March 26, 2012, 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time Note to journalists: Please report that this research was presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society

A press conference on this topic will be held at 6 p.m. Eastern Time, March 26, 2012, in the ACS Press Center, Room 15A, in the San Diego Convention Center. Reporters can attend in person or access live audio and video of the event and ask questions at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/acslive.

Newswise SAN DIEGO, March 26, 2012 The traditional way of making medicines from ingredients mixed together in a factory may be joined by a new approach in which doctors administer the ingredients for a medicine separately to patients, and the ingredients combine to produce the medicine inside patients bodies.

Thats one promise from an emerging new field of chemistry, according to the scientist who founded it barely a decade ago. Carolyn Bertozzi, Ph.D., spoke on the topic bioorthogonal chemistry here today in delivering the latest Kavli Foundation Innovations in Chemistry Lecture at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS). More than 15,000 scientists and others are expected to attend the meeting, being held here through Thursday and featuring almost 12,000 reports on new developments in chemistry and related sciences.

Bertozzi explained that the techniques of bioorthogonal chemistry may fundamentally change the nature of drug development and diagnosis of disease, so that the active ingredients for medicines and substances to image diseased tissue are produced inside patients.

Suppose a drug doesnt reach diseased tissue in concentrations high enough to work, Bertozzi said, citing one example of the potential of the new chemistry. Maybe it is an oral drug that doesnt get absorbed very well into the blood through the stomach. You can imagine a scenario in which doctors administer two parts of the molecule that makes up the drug. The two units reach diseased tissue in large amounts or get absorbed through the stomach just fine. Then they recombine, producing the actual drug in the patients body. Bioorthogonal chemistry is chemistry for lifeliterally!

Bertozzi explained that bioorthogonal chemistry opens the door to creating new proteins, fats and sugars directly inside living cells without harming them. The field emerged from her frustration in the late 1990s with the lack of tools available to see sugars on the surfaces of living cells. Chains of these sugars, called glycans, sit on the surfaces of cells in the body and control the doorways through which different molecules enter. When a disease-causing virus enters and infects a cell, for instance, proteins on the virus's surface attach to certain glycans.

To do that, we had to come up with a chemical reaction that would be really selective, only targeting the sugar of interest and the fluorescent probes that we delivered to it, said Bertozzi. The chemicals also couldnt stick to other biomolecules that the researchers didnt want to see.

That turned out to be a tall order, indeed. We pulled all of our big textbooks off the shelves and flipped through them to see if there was something out there that fit our criteria, she said. Those criteria were essentially the conditions inside a living cell or living organism such as a mouse a reaction that could occur in water at pH 7 and at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The reaction also couldnt interfere with all the other biomolecules in a cell or organism that keep it alive.

It was a pretty restrictive set of conditions that a traditionally trained organic chemist like me never had to work within, she explained. Thats because these types of reactions are usually performed in very clean, dry test tubes and flasks under conditions that the chemist can control. A living cell or organism, with all its water, proteins, fats, sugars and metabolites is very messy and uncontrollable by comparison.

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New Field of Chemistry Has Potential for Making Drugs Inside Patients -- and More

Public release date: 26-Mar-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Jennifer Beal physicalsciencenews@wiley.com 44-012-437-70633 Wiley-Blackwell

Weinheim, Germany -- Wiley-VCH, part of the scientific and technical publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and the Asian Chemical Editorial Society (ACES) today announced the launch of the Asian Journal of Organic Chemistry, the second pan-Asia society chemistry journal after Chemistry An Asian Journal (2010 Impact Factor: 4.188), launched by ACES and Wiley-VCH in 2006.

ACES is an association of 13 chemical societies in Asia and the Pacific region (the Royal Australian Chemical Institute Inc., the Chinese Chemical Society, the Hong Kong Chemical Society, the Chemical Research Society of India, Himpunan Kimia Indonesia, the Chemical Society of Japan, the Korean Chemical Society, Institut Kimia Malaysia, the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry, the Singapore National Institute of Chemistry, the Chemical Society Located in Taipei, the Chemical Society of Thailand, and the Chemical Society of Vietnam). For the publication of the Asian Journal of Organic Chemistry, ACES is joined by the Korean Society of Organic Synthesis.

The Asian Journal of Organic Chemistry (www.AsianJOC.org) will publish strictly peer-reviewed primary and secondary research in all aspects of organic chemistry. The first issue will appear in print and online in Wiley Online Library in the autumn of 2012 and will be published monthly thereafter. The Asian Journal of Organic Chemistry is a sister journal of the European Journal of Organic Chemistry, which is published by Wiley-VCH and ChemPubSoc Europe, the sister organization of ACES in Europe.

The Editorial Board is co-chaired by Sung Ho Kang from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Daejeon), Keiji Maruoka from Kyoto University, and Deqing Zhang from the Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing), whose combined and extensive expertise in organic chemistry reflects the broad scope of the Asian Journal of Organic Chemistry. In a joint statement, the Co-Chairs said, "Until now, the top international organic chemistry journals have been either American or European; the Asian Journal of Organic Chemistry is the realization of a dream for organic chemists in Asia".

Among others, Nobel Laureates Ei-ichi Negishi (2010), Akira Suzuki (2010), and Ryoji Noyori (2001) support the new journal as members of the Honorary Board. Kang, Maruoka, and Zhang are joined by a host of distinguished organic chemists on the Editorial and International Advisory Boards to ensure that the Asian Journal of Organic Chemistry is of the highest possible standard.

"The launch of the Asian Journal of Organic Chemistry reflects the extraordinary and continuing growth of the organic chemistry community in Asia" said the President of ACES, Youngkyu Do (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). "The opportunity to bring this to the global stage in a focused, high-quality publication is exciting" he added. Koji Nakanishi, a prominent member of the organic chemistry community and member of the journal's Honorary Board, remarked that: "In view of the surge in contributions from Asian countries, the launch [of the Asian Journal of Organic Chemistry] is wonderful".

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Wiley-VCH and ACES to launch organic chemistry journal rooted in Asia

"Chemistry on the nanometer scale often appears to be different compared to chemistry in the normal scale and carbon nanotubes provide ideal conditions for studies of reactions in nanospace," says Alexandr Talyzin, docent at the Department of Physics, Ume University.

The standard approch to make chemical recations inside of single walled carbon nanotubes, SWNTs, is to fill the inner space with molecules (e.g. fullerenes, thus forming so called peapods) and make them react with each other.

The nanotube walls will then protect the encapsulated molecules from outer space and make reactions with molecules and atoms outside the tube impossible. Once the SWNTs are filled with C60 molecules there is not enough space for hydrogen molecules to go in. That was the common opinion when the research groups started their experiments a few years ago.

But their experiments leave no doubt, hydrogen does actually penetrate into peapods and react with fullerenes. The evidence is rather direct, when the temperature and pressure of hydrogenation is taken to extreme values the fullerene cage collapses completely and large hydrogen molecules are formed. This was confirmed both by Raman spectroscopy and high resolution TEM.

The study provides one more example that chemical reactions in nanoreactors are not always the same as in normal conditions. In three-dimensional structure molecules can react with their neighbours in all possible directions, up, down, right, left etc.

"Inside of carbon nanotubes fullerene molecule have only two neighbours, lets say to the right and to the left. Similarly, the reaction with hydrogen is also limited to one-dimension," says Alexandr Talyzin.

A great advantage is that even single molecules inside of SWNTs can be observed using high resolution electron microscopy, something extremely difficult for bulk powders, he adds. High quality images collected at Aalto University allowed the scientists to observe not only hydrogen induced collapse of C60, but also hydrogen-driven coalescence of molecules into chain polymers and tubules.

"What we learned is a rather general result for nano-chemistry. Now we have direct evidence that molecules inside of SWNts can be reacted with gases. It opens enormous possibilities for synthesis of novel hybrid materials and chemical modification of encapsulated molecules and materials," says Alexandr Talyzin.

More information: Hydrogen driven collapse of C60 inside of SWNTs is published on line in Angewandte Chemie, http://onlinelibra 946/abstract

Provided by Umea University

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Chemistry in one dimension offers surprising result