Is that a starry sky or a bunch of hungry glow worms? Find out in this week’s Chemistry in its element podcast as Katherine Holt from University College London, UK, shines a light on how, and why, fireflies and glow worms create their mesmerising glimmer
15 November 2010: Have something to say about an article you’ve read on Chemistry World this week? Leave your comments below…
PHARMACEUTICAL
BMS donates diabetes money
The charitable arm of pharma company Bristol-Myers Squibb, the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, has said it will commit $100 million (£62 million) over the next five years as part of an initiative to help patients with type 2 diabetes with disease management. (more…)
Researchers asked to retract a Science paper have finally conceded to retraction more than a year after it was published. The much-criticised paper, published by researchers from Spanish National Research Council’s Institute of Catalysis and UK’s Bangor University, described the synthesis of 1676 quenched fluorescent dye-metabolite compounds.
Soon after publication of the paper, the work was heavily criticised by scientists around the world. They also pointed it to be a failure of Science‘s peer-review system which made it the topic of an editorial in Science in December 2009.
— A suggested list of ingredients can be found in JACS
Last year we published a story about chemistry supporting the RNA world hypothesis, now the same researchers have backed up what they did, and made precursors of the other nucleobases from simple starting blocks.
Using some of the same simple starting materials as they did last year, plus simple aldehydes and hydrogen cyanide, Matthew Powner, John Sutherland and Jack Szostak made an intermediate in the production of purine ribonucleotides. Their chemistry is a one pot synthesis in water, and suggests the first plausible mechanism for prebiotic nucleotide production. (more…)
PHARMACEUTICAL
Pfizer to divest Capsugel?
Pfizer has said it is ‘reviewing strategic alternatives’ for drug delivery unit Capsugel and raised the possibility of divestiture. In 2009, the unit generated sales of $740 million (£460 million). Pfizer expects to give the results of its review process by the end of the first quarter of 2011.
US approval for Kombiglyze XR
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted market approval to the combination diabetes candidate Kombiglyze XR (saxagliptin-metformin). The candidate, developed by AstraZeneca and Bristol-Myers Squibb, is a combination of the dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) inhibitor saxagliptin, marketed by Bristol-Myers Squibb as Onglyza, and metformin, a commonly used glucose lowering drug. Onglyza was approved in the US for type 2 diabetes in July 2009. It made sales of $85 million in the first nine months of this year. (more…)
Do you fancy nickel-plated lungs and a good dose of carbon monoxide? Then take a whiff of nickel carbonyl with Bernie Bulkin in this week’s Chemistry in its element podcast. If you survive that, you’ll hear how this unusual molecule led to a new way of purifying nickel metal and how it took a whole new theory of bonding to understand its structure.
Japanese researchers who have compared the proteins in emu and chicken egg white, focussing on the structures of proteins known to trigger allergic reactions, report that emu egg white has an unusually low allergenicity. Chicken egg white is, according to the researchers, ‘one of the most common allergenic foods’. (more…)
8 November 2010: Have something to say about an article you’ve read on Chemistry World this week? Leave your comments below…
— Robert Langer
The latest ranking of chemists according to Jorge Hirsch’s h-index is out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, George Whitesides has maintained his position at the top of the pile. In fact the top five are unchanged, but there is bit more movement lower down the table, with a few new entries. Highest of these is Bob Langer from the Massachussets Institute of Technology in Cambridge, US, who breaks in at number 7 with an h of 119 (meaning he has published 119 papers that have each been cited at least 119 times).
The full list of all 587 chemists so far indexed with h indices greater than 50 can be found at the bottom of this news story.
Phillip Broadwith
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