Category Archives: Chemistry

Giovanni Reyna, left, and Erling Haaland have developed a special relationship on and off the pitch ... [+] (Photo by RONNY HARTMANN/AFP via Getty Images)

There might be just one American among thetop 5 most valuable players in Concacaf. But in terms of depth, the US men's national team is the deepest in the region with ten players in the UEFA Champions League this season. One of them is Borussia Dortmund star, Giovanni Reyna.

I think its so exciting for all of us to have so many Americans, even if were not all playing, in a good environment day in and day out," Reyna said in an interview with Bundesliga.com. "There are guys at Barca, guys at Juventus, guys here in Germany and of course Christian [Pulisic] in London. There are so many guys with the best players in the world, learning every day, and its still a young core group."

Reyna was signed by Borussia Dortmund in Jul. 2019. The 17-year-old had his first experience in the Bundesliga under Lucien Favre last season. This year he has been a crucial player for the Black and Yellows scoring one goal and four assists in the first three Bundesliga games.

Im growing up fast at the moment; there is a lot coming my way," Reyna said. "My mom is luckily here now, so she is able to help me with everything I need, but in terms of on the pitch and off the pitch, also there is a lot of stuff happening."

Reyna's biggest milestone was scoring his first Bundesliga goal. At the time, he was the youngest goalscorer in Bundesliga historyJamal Musiala has since broken his record. His initial record almost escaped the young American. "No, I never really thought about it, but now that I think about it, two 17- year-olds that should be the youngest goal ever, so yeah, thats cool," Reyna said when asked about his record.

Giovanni Reyna scoring his first ever Bundesliga goal on matchday 1 of the season. (Photo by Alex ... [+] Gottschalk/DeFodi Images via Getty Images)

Being part of one of the most potent and young attacks in Europe helped Reyna to become quickly integrated in Germany. In fact, the American seems to have developed a special relationship with Norwegian star Erling Haaland, who regularly calls Reyna "the American dream" in post-game interviews.

I just think we came into the first team at the same time, obviously him getting bought from Salzburg and me getting promoted," Reyna said when asked about his relationship with Haaland. "Ever since then, we kind of looked at each other, saying we dont have as many friends as the other guys do, so we talked to each other right away and got along. On the pitch also, he kind of just told me what he likes, and I can play into his strengths, so he told me just to play the ball in behind, and I really saw his speed right away, and you can see its paying off. That chemistry is working, and I am just trying to make the whole teams life easy and especially his.

There were many teams interested in both Haaland and Reyna ahead of them, choosing Borussia Dortmund. Reyna stressed that joining Dortmund came down to various factors, including Christian Pulisic's previous presence at the club. More importantly, Dortmund's preference to play young players and their presence in the Champions League made were big factors.

As for the future, Real Madrid has been strongly linked to both Haaland and Reyna. But Borussia Dortmund is expected to sign Reyna to a new long-term contract soon. More medium-term expectations are that the 17-year-old will replace Sancho. As for the long-term, given his skill set, the sky appears to be the limit.

Manuel Veth is the editor-in-chief of theFutbolgrad Networkand the Area Manager USA atTransfermarkt. He has also been published in the Guardian, Newsweek, Howler,Pro Soccer USA,and several other outlets. Follow him on Twitter:@ManuelVeth

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Reyna On Playing With Haaland: The Chemistry Is Working - Forbes

Through a simple process of heating and cooling, New York University researchers have created a new crystal form of deltamethrina common insecticide used to control malariaresulting in an insecticide that is up to 12 times more effective against mosquitoes than the existing form.

The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), may provide a much-needed and affordable insecticide alternative in the face of growing resistance among mosquitoes.

The use of more active crystal forms of insecticides is a simple and powerful strategy for improving commercially available compounds for malaria control, circumventing the need for developing new products in the ongoing fight against mosquito-borne diseases, said Bart Kahr, professor of chemistry at NYU and one of the studys senior authors.

Improvements in malaria control are needed as urgently as ever during the global COVID-19 crisis, added Kahr. The number of deaths from malaria in Africa this year is projected to double as a result of coronavirus-related disruptions to supply chains. We need public health measures to curtail both infectious diseases, and for malaria, this includes more effective insecticides.

Malaria is a major public health challenge worldwide, with more than 200 million cases and 400,000 deaths reported each year. Insecticides such as deltamethrin can prevent the spread of diseases carried by mosquitoes and are often sprayed indoors and on bed nets. However, mosquitoes are increasingly becoming resistant to insecticides, leaving researchers and public health officials searching for alternatives with new modes of action.

Many insecticides, including deltamethrin, are in the form of crystalsthe research focus for Kahr and fellow NYU chemistry professor Michael Ward. When mosquitoes step on insecticide crystals, the insecticide is absorbed through their feet and, if effective, kills the mosquitoes.

As part of their research on crystal formation and growth, Kahr and Ward study and manipulate insecticide crystals, exploring their alternative forms. In their PNAS study, the researchers heated the commercially available form of deltamethrin to 110C/230F for a few minutes and let it cool to room temperature; this resulted in a new crystallized form of deltamethrin, composed of long, tiny fibers radiating from a single point.

Link:
Chemists Create New Crystal Form of Insecticide, Boosting Its Ability to Fight Mosquitoes and Malaria - NYU News

OXFORD, OHIO SEPTEMBER 28: The Buffalo Bulls huddle up during a timeout in the game against Miami of Ohio RedHawks at Yager Stadium on September 28, 2019 in Oxford, Ohio. (Photo by Justin Casterline/Getty Images)

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) In the most unprecedented college football season to date, almost nothing is typical or normal about the way teams go about their everyday preparation.

UB Football knows that all too well. After an COVID-19 outbreak hit 25 student-athletes in the athletics program, the team had to postpone practice for a few days before being able to start fall practice. Now, with almost two full weeks of practice under their belts, the Bulls are rolling with the punches of this abnormal season already.

Right now, weve had our fair share of things that have happened here, and our players have done a great job. When you look at some of the things that have transpired nationally with higher profile programs and players and coaches, its possible. Thats the reality that you have to deal with, UB Football Head Coach Lance Leipold said. I think you just have to be honest with yourself and do the best you can to find a way to get these guys to play football, but youve got to be ready.

Theres a lot of erasing or deleting of plans or you better have multiple plans ready to go to try and find a way to make it happen. I think from the early things is that our conference is on a good path to get this thing kicked off.

With daily COVID testing and working on opposite sides of the field throughout practice, head coach Lance Leipold says so far, the toughest obstacle the Bulls have had to face is a lack of team chemistry.

Right now the only time were able to have position meetings within our field house is on our non-testing days. Our schedule is between people coming into be tested and going through results and all those things, its been difficult, Leipold said.

Our coaches use things like Zoom to record notes and send it, and its all virtual. But when you do things virtually or sending information out, its harder to know if its being absorbed, if its being read, all of those things.

You have to have blind trust that our young men are doing everything, but were also trying to be as thorough as we can. Were working through it pretty well, our seniors have been outstanding, Leipold said. The routine is getting better for us to understand.

Knowing that this could be an issue, Leipold and the other Bulls coaches tried to integrate the entire team during Zoom meetings all the way back at the beginning of quarantine to try and get a head start on team cohesion for the 2020 season.

We do some things differently to try to break us out of just our position group, but youre looking at different boxes and youre able to interact differently, and we hope that has helped some, Leipold said. Weve tried to do some things differently, even in the locker room how weve organized the locker room to try to get players to interact more with other players in other positions. Were hoping were taking that. Were all playing with the same rules that started when we got going, you dont want a bunch of excuses or reasons why things didnt go right, and I dont want team cohesion to be one of those. Well be sure were where we wanted to be when we head to DeKalb, Illinois.

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Bulls tackling tough task of creating team chemistry with COVID restrictions - WIVB.com - News 4

Katie MackAllen Lane2020 | 240pp | 20ISBN 9780241372333

Buy this book on Amazon.co.uk

It can be difficult impossible even to truly comprehend the sheer scale of the cosmos. It is so vast and ancient that trying to imagine the science holding it all together can be overwhelming to our tiny human minds, and contemplating its eventual conclusion is yet more mind-boggling still.

Such is the task faced by Katie Macks The End of Everything. The book sets out to explain how the universe became, and the various ideas we currently have of how it might one day, someday, come to its end. For each of the five universe-ending scenarios, Mack explains what it would entail, why we think its a possibility and how we obtained the data that led us to that conclusion. All of this is simplified down to a level that is at least somewhat more accessible to the average reader than the quantum mechanics and general relativity that are actually going on in the background.

As dark and depressing as the subject matter might seem, Mack sells it brilliantly. Its always enjoyable to hear someone talk about something theyre passionate about, and its obvious on every page that Mack adores the field she works in. Even in places where her explanations become bogged down in dense calculations and theories, her enthusiasm for the science shes discussing is front and centre, and it can be infectious regardless of your actual interest in the particular topic. Combined with Macks humour and the way the book talks directly to the reader, the overall impression is a very friendly, engaging experience that carries any sections that may be too in-depth for the casual reader.

Mack has also taken care to be extremely honest in her summary of the current science. In areas where our collective human understanding of the universe is insufficient, she takes the time to explain our best guesses, how we came to make them and why we cant currently be sure what the actual solution is. For other topics where we have a better understanding of things, the book not only explains current theories, but also how we were able to figure them out. As a result, readers end up with a much clearer idea of the principles being discussed and how they can start to fit into the wider picture.

That being said, this isnt a book I would recommend to anyone who doesnt already have a grasp of general scientific principles. Mack does a fantastic job of explaining some very complex science in a way that is understandable to a non-cosmologist, but to do so she largely skips past explaining more basic concepts like atomic structure, excited states and the four fundamental forces of nature.

Beyond that, if you enjoy contemplating your own insignificance in the face of an uncaring universe or, perhaps, marvelling at the sheer power of the cosmos, this is definitely worth a read.

This book features in our book club podcast, which you can listen tohere.

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The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) | Review - Chemistry World

The discoveries that are recognised by the chemistry Nobel prize often exhibit certain features: inspiration, intelligence, rivalry, disputes about credit and no small amount of sheer luck. I would add the ability to recognise something important when you see it to that list. There is a long list of journals that rejected the early Crispr papers that led to this years award, often with notes that the manuscripts werent important enough to even review, or that their discoveries were already known.

My classic example is ferrocene, the first-of-its-kind organometallic sandwich compound that set off waves of discovery in a whole field. Unbeknown to each other, at least three groups prepared it independently. Only the second (Thomas Kealy and Peter Pauson at Duquesne University, US) and third (Samuel Miller, John Tebboth, and John Tremaine at British Oxygen) published their discoveries of the unexpected and weirdly unreactive yellow-orange product, nearly simultaneously in 1952.

Neither group was quite sure about the structure of the new compound. The Miller paper proposed two cyclopentadienes attached to a central iron atom by single bonds. Pauson ventured the same guess. He was bothered by the compounds stability, though, and wondered if it might be more ionic, with two negatively charged rings and a +2 iron as an odd sort of salt.

Neither Ernst Fischer in Munich, Germany, nor the team of Robert Woodward and Geoffrey Wilkinson at Harvard University, US, felt comfortable with those proposals. Moreover, they all felt that there was something unusual and important about the orange stuff, because no conventional structure seemed to explain its properties and reactions. Both investigations came to the same conclusion in early 1952: a sandwich of two (now aromatic) coordinated cyclopentadienyl rings with a fully booked-up (and thus unreactive) iron atom in the middle.

Generations of chemistry students have since grown up with this structure, so its hard for us to imagine how bizarre a proposal this was. Famously, the editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society wrote to Woodward that, although he was accepting the paper, I cannot help feeling that you have been at the hashish again. But x-ray crystallography quickly confirmed the idea in every detail, and metal-organic chemistry has never looked back. A host of metallocenes followed in an extremely spirited competition between the Fischer and Wilkinson labs, and these led to even more unheard-of coordination complexes, along with new synthetic methods, useful reagents and catalysts and new ideas about chemical bonds themselves.

The Nobel award came in 1973, after more than enough time had passed to show the discsoverys importance. It went to Fischer and Wilkinson, which led two days later to a letter from Woodward to the chair of the Nobel committee. Woodward wrote, he said, to let you know, most respectfully, that you have inadvertently, I am sure committed a grave injustice. He spoke of Wilkinson as a junior colleague who was skeptical of Woodwards solo inspiration, but whom hed done a favour by including him in the work. Wilkinson, needless to say, disputed this version strongly. And the Nobel committee (as always) did not second-guess or revise their award, a job no doubt made easier by the fact that they had already given a chemistry Nobel to Woodward eight years before.

But now we have to return to the beginning. There were three groups that had prepared ferrocene, and I have not yet mentioned the earliest of them all. That was a team at Union Carbide, who had sent hot cyclopentadiene vapour through an iron pipe apparatus at some point in the late 1940s. They were annoyed to find the equipment had unexpectedly clogged with yellow sludge. Someone kept a sample and everyone went on to the next experiment. Years later, re-analysis showed that the sludge was (of course) ferrocene. Had anyone had the curiosity to analyse it, and enough imagination to realise what its structure might be, they might well have had a Nobel of their own. Instead, they scrubbed their Nobel prize out with a brush and threw it into the bin. That should make any chemist stop and think about their failed experiments, shouldnt it?

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The Nobel prize that got binned | Opinion - Chemistry World

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Oct. 15, 2020) Researchers in the University of Kentucky Department of Chemistry are studying how smoke from wildfires can affect public health even hundreds of miles away from the source.

Associate professor Marcelo Guzman, along with graduate student Sohel Rana, say that molecules released from forest fires can become more water soluble, and likely toxic, over the two weeks that smoke is transported through the atmosphere. In addition to warming the atmosphere, these molecules can cause a host of respiratory issues in humans when inhaled.

As the biomass in trees, bushes, grass and peat are burned, large quantities of smoke, soot and other pollutants are emitted to the atmosphere, Guzman said. The smoke can then rise several kilometers in altitude and spread across large continental regions, polluting the air of distant areas. For example, many residents in the states of California, Washington and Oregon have recently experienced the poor air quality of hazy smoke.

Every year, thousands of hectares of land are engulfed by forest fires across the globe. So far in 2020, more than 2.6 million hectares in the western United States have been consumed by fires.

This ongoing UK project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, is examining how emissions from wildfires change with time in the atmosphere to create new chemicals that impact the health of societies and the Earths climate. In the lab, Guzman and Rana are studying the heterogeneous atmospheric chemistry of methoxyphenols, which are among the most abundant molecules emitted during biomass burning. The team highlighted that when methoxyphenols react at interfaces, such as on the surface of cloud and fog waters, as well as aerosol particles from pollution, electron and proton transfer processes are favored to quickly convert aromatic molecules into highly water-soluble products.

When you look at the mechanisms that these methoxyphenols and phenolic aldehydes undergo when exposed to background ozone gas and hydroxyl free radicals during atmospheric transport, you can start explaining the common observation of multifunctional carboxylic acids as abundant species in a lot of particles in the air we breathe, Guzman said. The report identifies unique reaction channels that can be used to distinguish the contribution of atmospheric processing of biomass burning emissions over other possible sources of multifunctional carboxylic acids. The work is not only fundamentally interesting, but identifies specific signatures for the daytime transformation of methoxyphenols emitted from forest fires as they age in the atmosphere.

To do this, the researchers use a special instrument in the lab that replicates the fast reaction between the methoxyphenols markers of biomass burning and ozone gas at the interface of air with micrometer-size water droplets. They then vary the concentrations and acidity in the experiments to see how the interfacial chemistry changes for different conditions occurring in the environment.

We are trying to understand the dominant transformations of the methoxyphenols from smoke in the atmosphere, determine their lifetime and establish how they chemically evolve at interfaces, Guzman said. We want to contribute new understanding of their impacts on human health and climate. Are the aged molecules more toxic? How do the structural changes of the molecules contribute to create particles that interact with sunlight affecting climate?

Guzman and Rana found that while in the air, the methoxyphenols in smoke react with ozone and hydroxyl radicals to become oxidized and highly reactive. A person breathing in these reactive compounds can suffer oxidative damage of cells, especially in the respiratory track and lungs. In addition, these reactive compounds can make some people more prone to other health problems.

Guzman also said that characterizing the chemical processing of pollution from wildfires and domestic woodburning can help to determine if so-called brown carbon in soot emitted from fires contributes to absorb more heat from the sun or not.

While the many small molecules in brown carbon can be quickly photobleached by the sun, the larger molecules are far more resistant, possibly contributing to the heating effect in the atmosphere, Guzman said.

Find out more about the research "Oxidation of Phenolic Aldehydes by Ozone and Hydroxyl Radicals at the AirWater Interface" in theJournal of Physical ChemistryatDOI: 10.1021/acs.jpca.0c05944.

Also, read more about the projectat https://uknow.uky.edu/research/chemistrys-guzman-study-atmospheric-reactions-pollution.

Research reported in this publication was supported by theNational Science Foundation under Award Number1903744.The opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Wildfire Smoke Toxicity Increases Over Time, Poses Public Health Risk, According to UK Chemist - UKNow