Chemistry World Blog

This week has seen two UK-based companies come under increased scrutiny in the US. BP’s latest attempt to close off the Deepwater Horizon oil well in the Gulf of Mexico has, so far, proved to be successful, with the well integrity test still ongoing. The company has said that ‘currently the well remains shut-in with no oil flowing into the Gulf’ and that the pressure in the well head is continuing to rise and is currently at 6700 psi.

Meanwhile, the safety of  GlaxoSmithKline’s type 2 diabetes therapy Avandia (rosiglitazone) has been being scrutinised by a US Food and Drug Administration advisory panel, see here for more details. (more…)

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The final day of ISACS2 presented the two remaining speakers with a tough task – keeping the audience’s attention with the sun shining on the beautiful city of Budapest outside. But both stepped up to the challenge.

Teri Odom from Northwestern University in Illinois, US, woke everyone up with her group’s work on highly structured nanomaterials. Her team has developed a way of making very uniform sized pyramidal ‘ice cream cone’ nanoparticles, which they can then stack one inside another to make super-strong particles for Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) spectroscopy. But the group gets a double whammy of interesting nanomaterials, because for every batch of the pyramidal shells they make, they also get a sheet of gold with an array of nano-sized holes in it. (more…)

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My final day at Macro 2010, was the one I was looking forward to the most. Not because I was finally able to go home, but because to me the symposium that truly linked polymer chemistry to all our everyday lives was to take place. (more…)

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The second full day of ISACS2 has drawn to a close, and I’m still reeling from trying to take in all the science in today’s sessions.

My favourite talk today came from Toshio Yanagida from Osaka University in Japan. He began by saying that the way we currently manage the transfer of information means that in 20 years’ time half of our electricity generation will be devoted simply to managing data networks. The human brain on the other hand uses about 1 Watt to power all of its thinking, so Yanagida’s group have devoted themselves to learning from the way muscle and brain systems take advantage of thermal noise to power their biomolecular machines to try and develop simpler ways to control complex systems using minimal energy. (more…)

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Well, after last night’s veritable feast of fine dining, today it was time to get down to the feast of fine chemistry – and I certainly wasn’t disappointed. Here are just a few of the highlights:

Moungi Bawendi from the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, US, and Hongkun Park from Harvard University, US, kicked off proceedings with a pair of talks about how light interacts with matter.

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Bawendi was looking at the real fundamentals of how quantum dots turn light into excitons (separated electrons and positively charged ‘holes’) and back again, whereas Park’s talk was looking at channelling light in the form of surface plasmons through silver nanowires to form the basic building blocks of optical circuits. If they excite the quantum dot with a green laser, the red fluorescence appears not only at the dot but at the far end of the nanowire as well.

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A common running theme at the Macro 2010 meeting seems to be polymers shaped like stars and I briefly mentioned work on these interesting shaped polymers on Monday.

Today, following this theme, Jean Fréchet kicked off the day with a very interesting talk on star-shaped polymers incorporating small cores such as styrene or pyrrolidine. He explained that these functional macromolecules can be used as catalysts very efficiently. (more…)

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In this week’s Chemistry in its element podcast, University College London’s Andrea Sella tells the fraudulent tale of elements 116 and 118

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A couple of students at the National Polytechnic Institute (NPI) in Mexico have developed a plastic that is non toxic and can degrade in a matter of seconds.

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Plastic bags are bad for the environment as they are non-biodegradable and it takes years for them to disintegrate. Besides, fossil fuels are used in their manufacture, with the consequent release of polluting gases into the atmosphere, and thus a greener alternative would be welcomed by environmentally aware consumers.

José Alfredo Carbajal Herrera and Víctor Hugo Reyes García have now solved this problem and are the creators of a new plastic, a biodegradable vinyl made from corn leaves that incorporates ‘very simple single-bonded hydrocarbon chains’ and can disintegrate in just seconds, Reyes says. (more…)

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The world of plastics is not often considered to  be particularly fast paced, but Bayer has shown that viewpoint to be a fallacy, by providing the polycarbonate for the new transparent (and removable) panoramic roof for the new Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport, which can reach speeds of over 400 km/h.

‘To make the roof easy to handle and also reduce its weight significantly, we opted to use Makrolon in our design. This polycarbonate from Bayer MaterialScience is an established material for the series production of lightweight automotive glazing,’ said Daniel Starmann, glazing project manager in Bugatti’s exterior engineering department.

The roof material contains filters that remove infra red and ultra violet radiation from sunlight and minimise solar warming of the car as well as reducing the chances of sunburn (compared with not having a roof) – ensuring you always look cool when getting out of one of the fastest and most expensive cars ever made! (more…)

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Following on from the first International Symposium on Advancing the Chemical Sciences (ISACS1) last week in San Francisco, US, the second meeting in Budapest, Hungary kicked off today. The theme of this second meeting is ‘Challenges in physical chemistry and nanoscience’, and I was lucky enough to bag a place at the speakers’ dinner tonight. The feeling I got from the dinner conversation is that physical chemistry is a massively broad subject, and often gets overlooked as it can be hard to classify – it’s almost like a catch-all for stuff that doesn’t fit as organic or inorganic.

But what it certainly does contain is a good slug of seriously interesting chemistry for you all to enjoy – I feel thoroughly primed for tomorrow’s talks and posters, so I’ll keep you all informed of what’s going on on the cutting edge of at least some of the multitudinous subjects arrayed under the banner of ‘physical chemistry’.

Phillip Broadwith